
Class. 
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COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY RUTH MARY WEEKS 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



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CONTENTS 

Author's Note v 

Editor's Introduction vii 

I. Foreword i 

II. The Hand of Iron 6 

III. The Public School 24 

IV. A School for the Plain Man ... 38 
V. Trade Education and the Woman . 57 

VI. In the Country ■ . . 74 

VII. Trade Education and Organized La- 
bor 91 

VIII. Trade Education and Socialism . . 102 

IX. Foreign Trade Schools 109 

X. American Experiments 149 

XI. The Type of Trade School Needed 

in the United States 167 

XII. Choosing a Vocation 181 

XIII. Conclusion 190 

XIV. Bibliography on Elementary Voca- 

tional Education 195 

Outline 203 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

The author is indebted to the late Stadtrat Emile 
Munsterberg of Berlin, Monsieur Et. Martin 
Saint-Leon of Paris, Mr. C. W, A. Veditz of 
Washington, Miss Alice Barrows of New York, 
and many school officials at home and abroad 
for aid in collecting material for this volume ; to 
Dr. Richard T. Ely of Madison, for helpful review 
of the present text ; and to her mother, Mrs. E. R. 
Weeks, for constant critical assistance in prepar- 
ing the manuscript for publication. 

Ruth Mary Weeks. 
May 6, 191 2. 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

It seems to be difficult for us to learn that human 
institutions may not be borrowed outright. The 
sight of some new form of efficiency in our neigh- 
bors over the sea stirs the conscious progressives 
at home to minute and wholesale imitation. This 
is particularly true where we feel second-rate, — 
in art, science, and education. In politics and 
industry, we are a trifle cock-sure of ourselves 
and copy scarcely at all ; but elsewhere we tend 
to be over-impressed by foreign example. 

The history of conscious educational reform in 
America offers many illustrations of indiscrimi- 
nate institution-matching, all the way from the 
kindergarten to the university. There have been 
large gains, of course ; but we have paid an un- 
necessarily high price in maladjustments. If only 
we had noted the essential elements of foreign 
experience and moulded the institutional forms 
to suit our own population and national ideals, 
we could have made our institutions far more 
effective. 

Just at the present hour, when we are assum- 
ing a vast program of vocational education, we 

vii 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

should have a particular care as to the way in 
which we are influenced by European experience 
and example. The social currents of our own life 
can no more be neglected in the construction of 
new human institutions, than the laws of gravi- 
tation in the building of material structures. It 
is all a matter of concrete conditions — the place 
where we build, the materials used for construc- 
tion and the purpose we have in mind. Our hu- 
man conditions never are coincident with those 
in any European country, and we ought at the 
very outset to assume that no European system 
of vocational training will wholly fit our needs. 
This might be laid down as a first principle. 

We shall of course need to study foreign prac- 
tice. A truly rational progress is always founded 
upon the lessons of experience, and when we 
have had little of our own, we are bound to un- 
derstand that which belongs to others. But cer- 
tainly we need to give as close study to our own 
social and economic conditions as to the educa- 
tional devices of a foreign land, for whatever we 
see in the latter must be transmuted in terms 
of the former. In no other way can we render 
foreign experience into practice economically and 
stably valuable for ourselves. 

Just because the following monograph presents 

viii 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

the problem of vocational education with an ap- 
proach and emphasis opposite to that of much 
current discussion, it is offered to the educational 
public with a special faith in its worth. The vol- 
ume is more than a stimulating presentation of 
facts and generalizations; it exemplifies a method 
of studying a vital institutional problem that 
ought to gain a wider acceptance among our 
educational reformers. 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 



FOREWORD 

The fact that only nine per cent of the pupils 
who enter the early grades of American public 
schools finish a high school course should be the 
cause of serious concern to every citizen. The 
taxpayer may well ask himself why he contrib- 
utes over twice as much for the support of sec- 
ondary schools that benefit one tenth of the pop- 
ulation as for that of those in which most chil- 
dren receive their only education. The educator 
must marvel that, with all the care and money 
lavished on our higher institutions of learning, 
they prove so unattractive to the majority of our 
children. And the worker for the public weal 
can find but a slowly widening outlook for social 
betterment when so small a per cent of the next 
generation are availing themselves of the means 
of improving their condition. 

That the public school is the corner stone of 
American democracy, has been reiterated until 

I 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

it is the merest platitude, but like most plati- 
tudes, it is absolutely true. If the people are to 
govern, they must know how to govern. 

The present is a time of feverish activity in 
all lines of philanthropic work. Social settle- 
ments flourish. The juvenile court is an estab- 
lished factor in legal procedure. Prisons are 
transformed into reformatories. Charity organ- 
ization societies coordinate the work of a hun- 
dred different agencies for alleviating distress. 
And while these various agencies have been 
helping the victims of society, they have learned 
a great lesson. The cause of the distress they 
strive to eliminate is in almost every case igno- 
rance. The ignorant mother fed her baby soured 
milk and it sickened. The ignorant consumptive 
slept in darkness and filth, with closed windows, 
and died. The ignorant voter sold his franchise 
to a boss and stole from his own pocket. The ig- 
norant public allowed dark, unsanitary tenements 
to be built in its midst and found itself confronted 
with a slum problem. The ignorant immigrant 
contracted himself to a master for half a man's 
wages and his family starved. The ignorant 
parent took his child to work with him in the 
factory and reduced his income. Less obvious 
examples do not lack. Ignorance — public or 

2 



FOREWORD 

private: at this door can be laid most wrongs 
and most endurance of wrong. If, then, to borrow 
Emile Munsterberg's phrase, "The aim of social 
work is to make itself superfluous," the way to 
effect a fundamental betterment in social condi- 
tions is to combat ignorance. No matter how 
picturesque, no matter how intelligently con- 
ducted and undoubtedly beneficent such enter- 
prises as reform schools, juvenile courts, poor- 
relief agencies, tuberculosis camps, and the like 
may be, their results are at best patchwork. 
They are necessary ; they are magnificent ; they 
are indeed educational : but they do not strike 
to the bottom. They make suffering more toler- 
able ; and they also serve to show what an amaz- 
ing number of things humanity needs to be 
taught. 

It is true that the proportion of grammar school 
to high school enrollment has tripled in the last 
fifty years. Yet is it a too paradoxical inversion 
of cause and effect partly to explain our previous 
growth in high school attendance by the wide 
extension of free school facilities which has taken 
place in this last half-century.? And is there not 
reason to doubt whether, under the present re- 
gime, this growth will or should continue .<* In 
other words, in settled communities where there 

3 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

are educational opportunities for all, has not the 
attendance upon high schools of the orthodox 
academic type reached a comparatively steady 
ratio to population ? 

Thus we return to the point that because ed- 
ucation is the only sure instrument of progress, 
it ought to cause grave concern to every person 
interested in the welfare of our country that as 
yet so small a per cent of our children take full 
advantage of the opportunities liberally offered 
them. 

The object of this book will be to explain why, 
in the opinion of the author, the attendance in 
our upper grades is so small ; in what points our 
schools fail to meet the needs of our people ; and 
how the course of instruction may be made more 
practical and thus hold children in school until 
such time as they are better trained for citizen- 
ship. It will also attempt to place the movement 
for trade education in relation to other social 
movements of the day. This discussion will be 
illustrated by a comparison with foreign methods, 
based on personal investigations of French and 
German schools. 

Of necessity, these pages must repeat much 
that is an old story to students of the question. 
Indeed, the present work represents not so much 

4 



FOREWORD 

new arguments and conclusions, as a marshaling 
of old facts in a somewhat more comprehensive 
array than has yet been attempted. However, 
as Charles Warner wrote four years ago in 
Charities and the Commons, " Although the in- 
adequacy of the public schools, as they are now 
conducted, to meet fully the greatest educational 
need of our times, is generally admitted, it may 
be questioned whether the influences that have 
brought about the development of a one-sided 
system of education, strong in the literary and 
scientific elements but weak and ineffective in 
vocational aims and results, are fully understood ; 
whether the ultimate effect upon the productive 
industries, upon commerce, and upon society of 
a continuance of such a scheme of education, is 
generally appreciated; and whether the respon- 
sibility of state and municipal authorities in the 
matter is recognized." 



II 



THE HAND OF IRON 

** A rational system of education will take account of changes 
in society and keep pace with their evolution." — Astier. 

Your true pedagogue is essentially a man of the 
world. He looks abroad to see the life for which 
he must train his pupils and thereby shapes his 
program. Before we can intelligently criticize 
our school system, we must formulate a defini- 
tion of society to serve us as a touchstone. Judg- 
ing by the direction of the most vigorous crea- 
tive activity of the present day, we may say that 
we live in The Age of Industry. As feudalism 
was the supreme offering of the ninth and tenth 
centuries to history, so our industries will be our 
contribution to progress. Into them go the im- 
agination, the inventive genius, the daring of the 
American people. 

Our industry has peculiarities which distin- 
guish it from that of the Middle Ages, when 
Holland and Belgium and Italy were humming 
workshops and the merchants were princes even 
as they are to-day. Then men labored with their 

6 



THE HAND OF IRON 

two hands, and from their skillful finger tips there 
passed into their work something of the very life 
and thought and feeling of the craftsman, until 
every most trifling product, every cluster of stiff 
roses carved on some blackened stick of furni- 
ture, every curious bird and beast tucked into 
the stonework of old churches, seems humanized. 
But industry has long since ceased to employ the 
hands of its workers. It uses more and more the 
iron hand of the machine. To write, to sew, 
to embroider — M. Brizon ^ details a dozen pro- 
cesses in which the machine with an almost un- 
canny dexterity supplants human fingers. With 
what vividness was the saying, ** The man does 
not work ; he watches the machine work," brought 
home to me in a New Haven screw factory ! 
There in a long dark room stood row after row 
of machines, all operating with a low, clicking 
sound. Each row represented the entire process 
of manufacture, from the time the steel wire was 
wound off a reel into the first apparatus to the 
moment when a completed screw dropped into 
a box behind the last machine. Several girls 
walked about the room and transferred boxes of 

1 Fierre Brizon, SiuthoToiL^apJ>rentissa^g: Hier — Aujourd''- 
hui — Demain and professor in the Ecole pratique d'Industrie 
de Rennes. 



THE PEOPLE»S SCHOOL 

half-finished screws from one machine table to 
the next. This was their whole occupation. The 
reason for this was suddenly apparent when a 
long jointed arm of steel stretched out slowly 
from one machine to the box of raw material on 
the next table. A two-fingered hand at the end 
of the arm closed on a screw, lifted it with pre- 
cision, opened its clawlike fingers, and dropped 
the bit of steel into position. As these hundred 
iron hands silently performed an almost human 
function, something of the terrible power of ma- 
chinery over the human lives that obey its dic- 
tates and surrender their minds to its mind was 
impressed upon me. 

This possible subservience of the man to the 
machine is the point where education must act 
for the protection of humanity against automa- 
tonism. The machine is in reality an extended 
hand, just as the pen is merely an extended fin- 
ger. As the finger obeys the dictates of the 
mind, so in turn does the pen. We are not domi- 
nated by our writing apparatus, but dominate it. 
Man is continually appropriating parts of his en- 
vironment and so joining them to his body. The 
typewriter, for instance, is a more skillful, elabo- 
rated hand which enables the mind to dominate 
more perfectly its writing apparatus. Larger and 

8 



THE HAND OF IRON 

more complicated machines are also only ex- 
tended hands developed to give the intellect 
greater freedom in carrying out its inspirations. 
Yet, far from giving greater freedom to the 
operator, the machine often kills life and intel- 
ligence. The weary operative in the cotton mill 
comes home from his day-long crossing and re- 
crossing of shuttles, stupefied, incapable of rous- 
ing himself to social pleasures without alcoholic 
stimulus. The one hundredth of a shoemaker 
clips on buttons year after year until his mental 
horizon is bounded by the circumference of a 
button. The man is dominated by his machine ; 
instead of his using the hand of iron for his own 
purposes, it has him by the throat. 

In commerce, the bookkeeper, the clerk, even 
the directing manager himself become slaves of 
the business organization, of routine, of a dis- 
embodied machine. For what is any machine 
but routine immutably fixed in wood and steel ? 
In every department of public service, the wheels 
of institutionalism grind on, relentlessly crushing 
personality and overwhelming individual initia- 
tive by their tremendous inertia. 

Extreme specialization in industry has turned 
man into a human tool instead of an independ- 
ent, self-directing individual. Machinery has ren- 

9 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

dered a long apprenticeship and the mastering 
of all the details of a trade unnecessary. A 
worker can learn a single process in a few days 
and begin remunerative work at once. But the 
narrowing results of over-specialized labor soon 
begin to show. It becomes impossible to teach 
him more of the trade in general, because his 
brain is stunted, and all his life he remains an 
unskilled laborer in a poorly paid, deadenmg po- 
sition. If the operative enters the factory very 
young, and if he survives until he is sixteen, his 
brain becomes so atrophied that unless he has pre- 
viously learned to read and write, he can never 
acquire even these rudiments of an education. 

With the introduction of this extreme speciali- 
zation in industry has come a general decay in 
the old forms of apprenticeship that were once 
the safeguard against its dangers. Formerly a 
laborer learned a whole trade ; he was resource- 
ful ; he could turn from one occupation to another; 
at least he understood the relation of the opera- 
tion he performed to the entire process of manu- 
facture. He had some intelligence about his work, 
some relation to the finished product. But the 
day of small employers with small shops, where 
apprentices could be profitably received and 
thoroughly instructed, is past. 

10 



THE HAND OF IRON 

There remain amazingly few industries which 
still take apprentices. Investigation shows that, 
out of four hundred establishments in Ohio, only 
sixty had apprenticeship systems and only three 
aimed to turn out first-class mechanics. It is true 
that certain large corporations, such as the New 
York Central Railroad, have regular schools of 
their own for training apprentices, but as one 
shop comprises many trades, this is possible only 
where very large numbers are employed, and even 
then is such an expensive undertaking as to bur- 
den any but the wealthiest company. William 
Dooley, of the Lawrence Industrial School, claims 
that only one third of one per cent of men be- 
tween fifteen and twenty-four receive instruction 
bearing upon their occupation, and the educa- 
tional path of even this infinitesimal fraction is 
rough and crooked. Union men give little ade- 
quate help to raw recruits, as they fear to create 
competitors for their own positions. Large con- 
cerns find the rush of production too great for 
them to spend time and material on apprentices. 
It pays better to put a man at once to work on 
some swift minute process, which he can learn 
without practice and perform without waste; and 
the narrow margin of profit in many smallershops 
also leads their owners to use " little workers " 

II 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

on odd jobs with no educative value, but from 
which direct financial profit accrues to the busi- 
ness. The baker's boy is seen running errands 
instead of being taught to bake bread ; the child 
in the mill stands by and hands bobbins to the 
man at the spinning-machine — a necessary link 
in the process of manufacture, but not an employ- 
ment calculated to develop an intelligent, self- 
supporting adult worker. 

At the present time, when there is the great- 
est temptation to the abuse of apprentices, we 
find no laws on our statute books to protect the 
child in industry and to procure him proper trade 
instruction. Formerly the law was very strict in 
this regard. An employer could not receive ap- 
prentices into his shop without giving proof of 
his ability to instruct them. The number of ap- 
prentices per shop was limited to insure each one 
his share of attention, and failure to perform his 
duty toward his apprentices cost the employer 
the privilege of receiving them. Before entering 
upon the practice of his vocation, the apprentice 
submitted, to a committee of judges chosen from 
the master workmen in his trade, a finished piece 
of work as guarantee of his capacity. Thus were 
the intelligence of the individual worker and the 
Standard of the trade safeguarded. This medi- 

12 



THE HAND OF IRON 

eval system fell into gross abuse, but the abuse 
was due to a fault, not in ideal, but in adminis- 
tration. The system was designed to uphold ex- 
cellence in workmanship, but the unregulated 
corporations, or free guilds, dominated by the 
employing class, used it to uphold their own 
power, and so brought about stagnation in indus- 
trial methods. 

But the day of apprenticeship is, as we have 
said, over. It is not now a question of writing 
laws to protect apprentices still left in isolated 
industries. It is a question of what is to take the 
place of old-time apprenticeship as a training for 
life work ; of what is to insure us a generation 
of competent laborers, of inventive workmen, not 
mere cogs in the machine but workMEN who 
will contribute creative mental effort to the pro- 
gress of industry. 

In spite of the success that attends modern 
production, results of the subservience of the man 
and his mind to the machine are not far to trace. 
Enter a large department store and walk past 
counter after counter heaped up with salable 
wares. Banal, senseless stuff, much of it! That 
a great improvement in some sections of pub- 
lic taste has come about of late is not to be 
denied. Arts and crafts work of a very acceptable 

13 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

character is to be seen jumbled together with 
flamboyant rubbish masquerading under the name 
of art. Go into the furniture section : simple, 
sensible, mission wood forms a restful oasis in 
the gimcrackery. And yet even these promising 
departures from current bad taste seem to have 
no force left over to carry production beyond 
the first side-step. A new style once discovered, 
it is duplicated and reduplicated ad nauseam. 
Moreover, are not our most beautiful modern chairs 
and tables copies of this or that antique fashion } 
The china section is crowded with reproductions 
of Sevres, of luster, of Wedgwood ware. The 
most harmonious rugs are antique or imitation 
thereof. 

Walk down a residence street built some years 
back before the reproduction of older architec- 
tural styles came into vogue. What meaningless, 
formless houses! What unmitigated plainness 
or what ugly, helter-skelter application of inap- 
propriate ornament ! How self-contained the colo- 
nial mansion around the corner seems ! Its walls 
and chimneys, porches and shutters, belong to- 
gether. It is unified, artistic, fills the eye as a 
whole. But even in the newer streets lined with 
such houses of individual, though borrowed, 
beauty, one has a curious impression of incon- 

14 



THE HAND OF IRON 

gruity. A Southern house with spacious galleries 
fronts an old English manor ; a Swiss chalet and 
a Queen Anne brick stand side by side. A Re- 
naissance palace holds itself compactly aloof from 
a rambling Spanish Mission in stucco. And 
on opposite corners are a Jewish synagogue 
in perfect imitation of the Parthenon, and a 
Methodist church in German Gothic. One rubs 
one's eyes in wonder if this be a sober everyday 
street or an architectural mask-ball. One expects 
to see the residences whip off their motley and 
appear in modern American garb. But, no I There 
is no American garb for them to put on. Our 
civilization has not yet expressed itself in stone. 
It is not yet thoroughly enough unified, and when 
it departs from beaten tracks, falls into chaotic 
scrollwork and the like. 

In such generalizations, it is possible to over- 
state grossly. To much that is said in the pres- 
ent chapter, the reader must make his own men- 
tal reservation. There is fortunately a reverse to 
the picture, but at this moment we are concerned 
with the darker side and with the reasons for its 
dimness. The inartistic, heterogeneous character 
of the bulk of our manufactured articles is par- 
tially traceable to the facts of production dis- 
cussed in the foregoing pages. The first principle 

15 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

of art is unity, wholeness. The work of art is an 
integral thing, the perfect expression of a com- 
plete thought or feeling. The man who deals in 
little scraps of life can never produce anything 
artistic. He can never write a novel — only a 
string of disjointed scenes. He can never paint 
a picture — only a huddled group of unrelated 
objects. He can never compose a melody — only 
a succession of isolated notes without cadence. 
Does he turn himself to humble decorative arts, 
the quality that fuses diverse parts together into 
a harmonious whole will be equally lacking. The 
border of Brussels lace has its laws of fitness as 
well as the symphony. The carved center table 
has the same claim to integrity as the drama. 

But what of the producers of our laces and 
center tables, of our crockery and wall paper ? 
Do they deal in complete thoughts and feelings } 
Do they deal in wholes, or only in scraps of life.^ 
Follow a simple article like a china tea cup 
through its creation in a New Jersey factory. 
Does it grow gradually beneath the hand that 
conceived it till it stands fragile and perfect, the 
line of gold within the delicate bowl prophetic of 
bright amber drafts, the handle molded for the 
touch of slim fingers, and the slender spray of 
flowers without the brim suggesting the evanes- 

i6 



THE HAND OF IRON 

cent aroma of the tea ? No ! the process has been 
most unpoetical. The cup has passed through a 
hundred hands on its way to the delivery room. 
One man worked the clay ; another molded it ; 
another painted the flowers by a prescribed pat- 
tern ; another thrust it into the baking-oven ; 
another watched it and took it out, and so on till 
we reach a person whose entire function has been 
to put on the tiny spot of gilt in the center of 
each blossom. All day long he has done nothing 
but apply gilt dots to flowers on tea cups of 
whose origin he knows little, and of whose desti- 
nation he cares less. If some one should invent 
a machine that could apply gilt dots with unfail- 
ing accuracy, the man would disappear from in- 
dustry and no one be the loser. That he is a man 
counts for nothing. How can the laborer who 
makes so microscopic a part of an object con- 
tribute to its artistic quality.? Of course he is 
expected to contribute nothing. He is blindly 
following the plan of another. Yet he is study- 
ing in the industrial school which must shape 
our national taste. He is dealingwith mere scraps 
of his trade. When called upon to construct a 
tea cup of his own, will it not be an ill-assorted 
patchwork of forms and lines and colors } 

A more obvious result of the entire separation 

17 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

of the worker from the finished product is a cer- 
tain deterioration in output which is prevented 
only by the greatest diligence on the part of in- 
spectors and foremen. Here, too, caution must 
be taken not to overstress a partial explanation 
for a situation dependent on many causes. But it 
is only natural — mankind not yet being en- 
dowed with those ethical qualities that entail 
blind, minute, impersonal right doing — it is only 
natural that a man who adds a single spot of gilt 
to a tea cup will take less interest in having that 
cup perfect in every detail than if the entire 
article were the work of his own hands and 
would be known and criticized as his. In fact, 
" Tom Jones, his cup " will be much better made 
than " Tom, Dick, Harry, and nobody knows or 
cares whose cup." In these days of enormous 
factories and antagonism between labor and capi- 
tal, we have lost much of the old personal interest 
in the honor of the firm which might once have 
taken the place of individual pride and bound 
every hand over to his best effort in even so small 
a matter as gilt dots. Therefore we have much 
that is shoddy and ill-made turned out upon the 
market, and as the market has a voracious, indis- 
criminative appetite which manufacturers do not 
neglect to stimulate, much that is hideous, use- 

i8 



THE HAND OF IRON 

less, and undurable finds its way into our homes. 
The consuming and producing public are the same ; 
their respective taste and intelligence is a closed 
circle. 

This specialization is not only anti-artistic but 
anti-progressive. True it is that one cause of our 
industrial advance has been the specialization of 
hand processes until one man, in performing the 
same operation a thousand times a day, at last 
reduced it to such simple terms that a machine 
could take it over. But in the course of this de- 
velopment, we have lost humanly while we gained 
mechanically. In the past, the great inventions 
have come from the ranks of the workers. And 
though invention is becoming more and more a 
special profession, still, if we reduce this labor- 
ing public to automatic, unthinking machines, 
we are shooting a heavy bolt across the door of 
progress. 

We do not need to go farther into the discus- 
sion to infer that society has created a mighty 
tool whose use we have not yet mastered, and 
which therefore bids fair to master us, — the iron 
hand of the machine. It is a case of how to pre- 
vent the tail's wagging the dog. To control and 
best utilize the mighty equipment which industry 
possesses, it goes without saying that we need a 

19 



THE PEOPLE»S SCHOOL 

skillful, intelligent labor force. That we seriously 
lack such a force is proved by the complaints of 
employers on every hand. C. W. Cross, superin- 
tendent of apprentices for the New York Central 
Railroad, reported some time ago that their shops 
were in straits for lack of well-prepared machin- 
ists. Mr. Thurber, of Ginn & Company, says : 
" In our work, we need skilled, thoroughly trained 
workers whom we find it more and more difficult 
to get. There have been times when, if there 
had been a place where we could send a promis- 
ing man to learn things thoroughly, we would 
have sent him at our own expense and paid him 
a salary to go." 

The National Educational Association, in its 
1909 report, publishes the startling figures that 
fifty per cent of our skilled mechanics are for- 
eign-born and trained and that ninety-eight per 
cent of the foremen in New York manufactories 
were educated across the water. In other words, 
Americans to fill such positions are not to be 
found. The demand for skilled workers is other- 
wise proved by the flourishing of private techni- 
cal and commercial schools for adults who are 
trying to make up for lost time and fit themselves 
for the jobs they see monopolized by their alien 
rivals. 

20 



THE HAND OF IRON 

The American Federation of Labor, alive to 
the interests of American workers, has appointed 
a committee to look into the question of indus- 
trial training. One reads daily in the papers, one 
hears daily at the dinner table, discussions of the 
incompetence of workmen. At afternoon tea, 
dainty my lady can talk of nothing but " stupid 
Jane" and "inefficient John." There is even 
very grave suspicion whether, if my lady were 
deserted by Jane or John, she could wield do- 
mestic implements with greater effectiveness. 

If we doubt the testimony of employers, we 
need only to mark the rapidly increasing force 
of vagrants who rotate each year from coast to 
coast; we need only to remember the unemployed 
for whom, during moderate prosperity, it is more 
and more difficult to procure work, and whose 
numbers in times of acute crisis in any special 
branch of industry are appallingly augmented. 
It is necessary to ponder on these peculiarly 
modern phenomena alone to become convinced 
that there is a tremendous industrial misfit be- 
tween man and job. The two problems have 
many aspects which are beside the question here, 
but it is safe to say that the chief cause of chronic 
unemployment is lack of training for definite 
work, and that a common cause of acute unem- 

21 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

ployment is minute specialization. The unintel- 
ligent specialist when thrown out of one occupa- 
tion finds it impossible to turn to any other, and 
must laboriously acquire a new specialty or lie 
idle till such time as there is again room for him 
in his old trade. I have seen a comparatively 
high-grade worker idle for almost a year, because 
he was too old to be taken in as a beginner in 
some other industry. Business is very cruel to 
the old ; it will not waste time sharpening a worn 
tool when bright, new ones can be had. 

The overcrowding and consequent underpay- 
ing of the nonindustrial pursuits is another sure 
sign of maladjustment. For certain manual work 
it is impossible to find American labor, and were 
the positions not filled by the ever-arriving im- 
migrant of doubtful capacity, industry would 
come to a standstill for the want of any helpers, 
good or poor. 

In short, the industrial situation may be 
summed up as follows : standards of production 
are open to improvement ; employers are finding 
it difficult to procure intelligent, skilled, resource- 
ful workmen, capable of turning from one branch 
of a trade to another, and of advancing from less 
to more skilled positions ; an ever-swelling class 
of unskilled laborers is being created ; the num- 

22 



THE HAND OF IRON 

bers of the unemployed are growing; and many 
manual tasks would remain undone were it not 
for the influx of only half-desirable foreigners. 

In spite of the fact that we have ridden on 
the crest of prosperity, in spite of the fact that 
as a manufacturing country we stand among the 
first, the far-sighted man will herein detect symp- 
toms of disintegration. Although we are con- 
fronted by no such " crisis in apprenticeship " 
as has destroyed the century-long French pre- 
eminence in hand industries, the political scien- 
tist may well strive to forestall that conceivable 
event. As a nation we desire to be self-sufficient ; 
as a people we desire to be strong and intelligent. 
The dominant factor in our national development 
we must not neglect. Certain social phenomena 
of poverty and crime are manifest among us, 
phenomena which have absorbed the attention 
of the public to the exclusion of the deeply un- 
derlying fact that, living in an age of industry, 
we have not yet learned how to be wisely indus- 
trious. Apprenticeship is a dead letter. Where 
shall we learn.? 



Ill 

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 

The American belief in humanity is embodied 
in our public schools. Biologists tell us that 
children are born much more nearly equal than 
we have dreamed, and that not nature, but star- 
vation has produced the myriad of stunted beings 
who cumber society with their unprofitable lives. 
To smelt this crude ore of human possibilities 
into serviceable gold, we have public schools. 
The creed our fathers held, when they declared 
for liberty and equality, is still ours. We believe 
that all men have a right to be of as much use 
as they can in the world, and we prove our faith 
in the perfectibility of all our people by investing 
in their education. 

Therefore the public school labors to open the 
doors of culture to every child within its juris- 
diction. Equality of worldly goods we cannot 
have; but at least in the schools we shall have 
democracy of training. An ideal type is held 
before us as the goal of study — the ** all-round 
man." No undemocratic limitations must be put 

24 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 

upon the growing boy. His education must be 
fitted to the highest as well as to the lowest circle 
in which it can be his lot to move. Therefore 
early decision upon a future calling is discour- 
aged, lest perchance a Shakespeare should tie 
himself to carpentry before his genius comes to 
Hght. And so, having insecurely bagged that 
slippery eel, general intelligence, the high school 
graduate sallies forth upon the world in search 
of what fate sends his way to do. Unawares that 
** insecurely" slipped into the sentence. Just as 
unexpectedly an undemocratic element has crept 
into education through the would-be democratic 
effort to keep it the same for all. 

Naturally enough, when men first struggled 
for freedom, it was in the realm of abstract know- 
ledge that they found themselves least bound by 
the limitations of everyday life. Rich and poor 
could multiply with the same accuracy and, when 
polished to the proper brightness, read literature 
with the same fervor. On this wide common, 
they could disport themselves untrammeled 
by the economic facts that sent one to schoal 
in broadcloth and the other in shoddy woolen. 
Mastery of these cultural branches had also been 
the mark of gentility, and to introduce into popu- 
lar education everything previously monopolized 

25 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

by the upper classes was the first step of liberal 
reformers. Much the same process has been 
repeated in establishing higher education for 
women, and, of late, in the education of the negro. 
Those coveted branches long appropriated by 
men were studied with avidity to the exclusion 
of many things important to the well-being of 
women ; and too many a negro, in order to be 
exactly like the whites, has striven after Latin 
and Greek to the detriment of his own best in- 
terests. As we find conceptions of woman's edu- 
cation calculated to make women resemble men, 
just so the democracy of the founders of our 
present generally accepted theory of education 
seems to have been to elevate "the masses" by 
recasting them in an "upper-class" mold. Thus 
the public school is the embodiment, at once, of 
a democratic attitude toward men, but a most 
undemocratic view of the social organization. 

The result of this experiment is "class educa- 
tion " in our secondary schools. At most, only 
ten per cent of the pupils of the ward schools go 
through the high schools. Three fourths of the 
pupils enrolled in the first year of the high schools 
drop out before the end of the course. Among 
those who remain, more than half are girls, and 
of the typical graduating class the majority either 

26 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 

go to college or enter professions and commerce. 
In other words, only those who are destined for 
professional and commercial life attend the pub- 
lic high schools, or the training given therein fits 
pupils for and directs them towards professions 
only. The truth holds much of both hypotheses. 
Uniformity, always infinitely undemocratic, has, 
in the methods of our really excellent high schools, 
proved unfair to an overwhelming majority of 
our children, who, because they belong in a walk 
of life for which the secondary schools do not 
fit them, drop out with the bare rudiments of a 
general education, long before they are prepared 
for the intelligent citizenship upon which the 
security of our government depends. 

A glance at the average high school curric- 
ulum, from the point of view of the more than 
seven millions of our citizens who are employed 
in industrial and manual pursuits, explains the 
situation. Mathematics and history, science, 
language and literature meet our eye. But the 
unlettered laborer looks in vain for something 
that will make his son a better locksmith or 
bookbinder, and he ponders deeply on the prob- 
lem of how his boy can afford to spend four years 
in the pleasant pursuit of culture, while he him- 
self is waxing old and less able to care for his 

27 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

family, and may even need support before the boy 
is in a fair way to make a living. It is snobbish 
to suppose that the average working parent is 
not interested in the welfare of his children; 
that he always sends them to work when the age 
of compulsory school attendance is over, through 
selfishness alone. If the poor father has any 
hope at all, it is usually for his little ones. He 
will sacrifice much and work early and late that 
they may have a better chance than he. It is 
safe to hazard that, next to earning bread for the 
morrow, there is no subject on which he does 
more thinking than the future of his children. 

The workingman, then, has decided against 
the high school. An ignorant decision ? Perhaps 
not so altogether philosophical and fine-spun as 
the one you, intelligent reader, are making by 
the warmth of your fireside, sunk in an easy- 
chair, secure of your future, and dallying with 
this book half quizzically as with a subject that 
arouses curiosity, but not your vital interest. But 
he has experienced the hard facts of life, and 
knows that how to earn a living and earn it well 
is the paramount question which must be settled 
before love and happiness and beauty, before life 
itself can begin. You tell him that if his child 
remains in school, he will be able to earn more 

28 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 

in the end than if he goes at once to work and 
climbs the industrial ladder without further edu- 
cation. You tell him that his boy will be able to 
turn his hand to many jobs ; that he will have 
more general ability, more chances. But he 
knows that production demands men who can 
do some one thing skillfully. He sees that skill 
is not so easily mastered ; and he fears to have 
his boy lose time which should be devoted to 
acquiring dexterity that can command a man's 
wages for him when he is a man. You suggest, 
again, that if the child stays in school, he will 
be able to raise himself above the level of manual 
toil, and will in this field certainly outstrip the 
untutored applicant for work. Yet perhaps the 
rough-handed laborer will know how commerce 
is already over-full of helpers, and how at the 
skirts of the genteel professions trails a great 
army of unnecessary, unsuccessful men who 
hover ever between industry and gentility, 
crowded from the latter by competition and shut 
from the other by inclination and unfitness. 

Why shut from the other by inclination } Is 
not the whole atmosphere of the classroom in 
our high schools anti-industrial ? Is not the em- 
phasis ever upon intellectual achievements in 
the realm of letters and art and abstract science ? 

29 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

Does not the butcher's or the machinist's boy 
seem to breathe another ether here than in his 
own home ? What use has the school world for 
the facts of his father's life ? What use has his 
father's life for the facts of the school world ? 
Use enough, if he saw the truth ! But he rarely 
sees it. And does he not naturally infer some 
innate difference between these two sections of 
life, and also the superiority of the school world, 
with its beauty, its wealth of new information, 
its quick interchange of thought with eager fel- 
low students, and its inspiration from sympa^ 
thetic teachers glad to foster a growing taste foi 
culture ? What do we do to convince pupils that 
Shakespeare is as much in place on a tinsmith's 
table as on a jeweler's? What do we do to in- 
terest them intelligently in the pursuits at which 
one half of them must spend their lives, and, as 
ex-President Roosevelt puts it, to cure them of 
the idea that to earn twelve dollars a week and 
call it a " salary " is better than to earn twenty- 
five dollars and call it *' wages " ? 

Manual training advocates will here slip be- 
tween the lines the plea that their departments 
inculcate respect for labor, and that they offer 
the practical application of theoretical knowledge 
for which we so loudly clamor. The question is, 

30 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 

indeed, of great interest at this point in the dis- 
cussion. The manual training teacher has grasped 
a great psychological truth ; he stands for bal- 
ance, for purposeful use of the finely adjusted 
bodily mechanism with which we are endowed. 
There is a bit of the ancient Greek in his demo- 
cratic view of personality, of body and mind as 
an interacting whole. But he too ranks with the 
" generalists." His work is but practice work, 
designed to foster an all-round facility of hand, 
important as a means and fatal as an end. 

When manual training was first introduced 
into high schools, its strictly developmental func- 
tion in the curriculum was mistaken for practical 
trade instruction by many parents in a class 
whose children had not hitherto gone to high 
school, and a large increase in enrollments fol- 
lowed. But when the public saw that, valuable as 
the new experiment was and is, it was not the 
threshold to industry, that an apprenticeship was 
still imperative before wage-earning could begin, 
the disproportionate increase in school attend- 
ance merged into the normal increase, and the 
situation remained almost as before. Classes 
have, indeed, been organized in many schools 
which "^prove not only developmental but of im- 
mediate practical service, and these classes have 

31 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

held many a child in school who would otherwise 
have gone at once to work. In this regard, girls 
have fared better than boys, for manual training 
for girls has invariably taken the form of sew- 
ing, cooking, or millinery. But these studies, as 
well as sloyd, electricity, ironwork, and sometimes 
even the long-established commercial courses, 
count little in the school credit systems. In this 
forward step we are again dragging the old ball 
and chain of wrong emphasis. For while learn- 
ing should teach us to bring to bear upon our life 
work " the best that is known and thought in the 
world," we are still leading too many of our child- 
ren away from their life work ; leading them to 
' suppose that it is really unworthy, by putting it 
in a secondary position in our courses of study. 

For the same reason that so few children enter 
the high school, many drop out at the end of the 
first year. The boy, especially, finds the high 
school course too often unadapted to his wants. 
In the first place, boys are outnumbered, for since 
the economic pressure is not yet so great upon 
girls, they stay longer in school. In three cases 
out of four, also, the instructors are women. 
There is no doubt that the influence of women 
on adolescents is strong and good, but the exces- 
sive feminization, too often seen in curricula 

32 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 

framed by them for pupils, the majority of whom 
are girls, makes the boy feel awkward and out 
of place in the program. Because literature is so 
often taught from a feminine point of view, with 
which the decidedly non-soulful, normal boy is 
utterly out of sympathy, he comes to the errone- 
ous conclusion " that it is all rot anyway," and 
misses the inspiration, the glimpse into a world 
of keener beauty and the future fund of resource 
within himself that a manly love of reading 
should bestow. He becomes restless under the 
routine of work ; he does not see where it is 
tending ; he stops studying, and his school at- 
tendance becomes a mere wearisome seat-filling. 
Or perhaps there is an occasional holy infant 
who, though uninterested, studies his lessons 
just to get them, for, being good, he does as he 
is told and asks no questions. Fortunately this 
type is rare. You may browbeat girls ad libitum : 
not all girls, but girls in general. They are of 
the accommodating sex. Custom and heredity 
have made them pliable. But the boy is a stiff 
sort of twig and hard to bend. The mill may 
grind on ; he remains obstinately irreducible, 
and quits school after a while because he sees 
" no sense in it," and longs for something "worth 
while " on which to lavish his young energy. 

33 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

The author once had in an English class a 
splendid sort of chap, though crude as yet. One 
day he came with shining eyes to tell of a wonder- 
ful chance to earn sixty dollars a month that had 
just been offered him, and that looked a glitter- 
ing independence to a boy whose father had never 
allowed him any command of money. Except in 
wood-turning where he led his class, his work 
took, for the moment, no alluring form. He 
needed schooling, needed it badly; but I found 
it hard to answer when he said with sudden pene- 
tration, *' See here, I know I 'm raw and green 
and use bad grammar off and on. But I 'm not 
doing any good here. Maybe it 's my fault, but I 
can't seem to hitch on, and all I learn in high 
school won't help me to make more than sixty a 
month when I begin. It's all right for Dodge 
and Kelly and those fellows who are going to 
college or into the law. But dad can't send me 
to college. I've got to earn my grub right off 
and I might as well start in." Nothing will hold 
a boy when independence calls, except the surety 
of greater profit to himself or a strong personal 
interest in his work. Both were supplied to 
"Dodge and Kelly " by their careers. They could 
refer present dryness to the future for illumina- 
tion. But our ordinary boy was getting all the 

34 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 

education he would ever have and naturally de- 
manded that it be worth "more than sixty a 
month." It is needless to say that sixty dollars 
a month is an exceptional alternative to further 
schooling. As Dr. Kingsbury's^ investigations 
in Massachusetts prove, an errand or office boy's 
job is nearer the average. But whatever the bait, 
and however short-sighted the choice, the motive 
for leaving school remains the same, and is 
equally imperious. 

The lack of practical interest in high school 
work is too often intensified by a lack of vitality 
in teaching, from which the college preparatory 
student suffers as much as the boy destined for 
industry. In the same spirit which omits practi- 
cal branches from the curriculum, the instructor 
often fails to make constantly the connection 
between what is taught in school and the actual 
facts of the children's experience. History gets 
to be a world shut in between the covers of a 
book. Physiology and hygiene are something to 
recite about and not to apply to the ventilation 
of one's bedroom. Mathematics becomes an ab- 
stract juggling with figures. Even literature, 
that hardest of subjects to kill, falls into the cate- 

1 Susan Myra Kingsbury, of Simmons College, investigator 
for the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education. 

35 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

gory of things to be learned and not lived, and, 
instead of opening their eyes to the undreamt 
wonder of the world, succeeds merely in giving 
children a positive distaste for books. Against 
this petrifaction of school work, every instructor 
fights. Live teachers die hard, if we may put it 
so. But a huge machine, such as the ward schools 
of a large city, or the numerous departments in 
a high school, acquires tremendous momentum. 
The wheels once started, a course of study once 
drawn up, the thing moves on irresistibly, flat- 
tening out individual method, and conforming 
all to the preconceived pattern. And still this 
mechanization, which victimizes, first teachers, 
then pupils, is necessary in the administration 
of large scale education. System we must have, 
only, please God ! let us not magnify the system 
into an end, a something valuable in itself to 
which our pupils can be sacrificed. M. Brizon 
has astutely remarked, "It is convenient, no 
doubt, to have recourse to routine ; but the school 
is not made for the convenience of the masters ; 
it is made for the best development of the vary- 
ing faculties of the pupils." Yet when the class- 
room fills five or six times a day with thirty new 
faces, is it not natural that after draining his 
energy in the mad attempt to be a hundred and 

36 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 

fifty people, to understand a hundred and fifty 
needs and feelings, to lead a hundred and fifty 
lives, the master will some day fall back into the 
arms of routine which makes all things plain and 
easy ? Will he not some day, unable to keep in 
touch with his pupils, begin to teach the course 
of study for its own sake ? Will he not begin to 
show signs of Irritation with the pupils whom it 
does not fit ? Will he not call them dull and stu- 
pid, and even end by disregarding them entirely? 
And will not the children who come from his 
hand be clipped and trimmed out of originality 
into uniformity, as like as possible to the Imagi- 
nary Pupil for whom too many a course is planned, 
and who has no more actual existence than the 
Economic Man of the old economists ? 

We have ridden our favorite hobby a little 
aside the question, but not so far that a straight 
bridle path will not bring us out again on the 
main track, and set us jogging toward the old 
point that our expensive high schools are "class" 
schools whose pupils are drawn largely from one 
class of society, and which produce solely appli- 
cants for that class; and that the boasted de- 
mocracy of popular education has evolved a sys- 
tem which "prepares for everything in general 
and nothing in particular." 



IV 

A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 

While pedagogues were arguing behind dosed 
doors the perennial question of the Humanities 
versus the Modernities, the facts of life, which 
have an inveterate habit of keeping in advance 
of thought, came knocking without and crying, 
" In God's name, open ! Dispute no more whether 
air or water is most necessary to our children's 
life, but bethink you what meat you will set be- 
fore them, for they are sore hungry and would 
eat ! " The facts of life and their good friend 
common sense demand a school for the plain man. 
Industry no longer trains its workers ; and yet 
they must be trained. M. Astier and his col- 
leagues ^ have struck the sensible and philosophi- 
cal note with French directness when they main- 
tain that " in our epoch of feverish activity, we 
cannot leave to routine the task of regulating 
commercial and industrial operations. Science 
is the prime factor in all progress." Industry 
needs not only the scientific knowledge of its great 

1 Astier et Cuminal, L'' Enseignement Technique. 

38 



A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 

directors, but the scientific, understanding spirit 
of every man along the line. 

To foster this spirit is the duty of educational 
institutions from primer grade to university. The 
movement toward such an orientation of studies 
is well begun in our colleges, and schools of 
this, that, and the other practical branch spring 
into existence in every state. The link between 
theory and practice should be drawn even closer. 
Many of the lower schools also must grow into 
laboratories of industry where skill of hand and 
skill of mind are taught and our young folk learn 
that intelligence and daily living should be syn- 
onymous. Then only will the high school ideal 
be fitted to the demands of our society. Then 
only shall we supply to the world what the world 
asks of us — a skilled worker. To beat about the 
bush no longer, common sense demands trade 
education. 

The voices which stoutly declared that the 
standard of scholarship was sure to fall when 
manual training entered school curricula now 
rise again in lamentation. Prophecy is an uncer- 
tain role ; and an advance verdict as to the in- 
fluence of trade education on general scholar- 
ship may turn out as wide of the mark as the 
premature fusillade against manual training. But 

39 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

the writer finds it natural to hope that a salutary 
reaction on educational methods will follow the 
establishment of trade high schools. 

In the first place, the dominance of the college 
preparatory ideal, against which so many princi- 
pals are now struggling, will be permanently 
broken. In academic high schools, a single eye 
can be kept upon college as the end of every 
course, with the conceivable result of a far more 
thorough college preparation than at present. 
In the trade school, the child to whom college is 
a mere disturbing impossibility, will be free to 
study what he needs. Class education, you say ^ 
One sort for the laborer ; another for the brain 
worker ? But we agreed that differentiation was 
essential to democracy, and that no class educa- 
tion could be so disastrous as that invidious 
species which now masquerades amongst us as 
"popular." And will it not be infinitely fairer to 
all concerned when fewer things are studied, but 
are studied well .-* When each child gets his due 
instead of being fed an indigestible mixture of 
what is good for each .-* When the college pre- 
paratory student need not waste time on sketchy 
courses he will duplicate later in detail } When 
the manual worker will not consume costly time 
stolen from his trade, in mastering branches that 

40 



A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 

belong to another scheme of life than his ? And 
when the harassed teacher will no longer be dis- 
tracted by the necessity of basing a general in- 
telligence course on college entrance require- 
ments, and of teaching everything superficially 
because he must teach enough to meet at some 
point the needs of every part of his mammoth, 
heterogeneous class ? 

Here we may note that trade schools mean 
smaller classes, and more of that personal rela- 
tion between teacher and pupil which makes for 
vividness, originality, and inspiring work, and 
whose absence is accountable for the impersonal 
dryness of so much teaching. The Philoctetian 
bowlings of academicians, wounded in their dry- 
as-dust supremacy, must again drop into silence. 

Each argument advanced for manual training 
holds in the case of industrial training with three- 
fold force. The child is essentially creative and 
practical. Theoretic teaching needs illustration 
to have weight with him ; and he needs a physi- 
cal outlet for his ideas. What general manual 
training adds to the curriculum of an academic 
school, trade work would contribute in the indus- 
trial school, with the advantage of even greater 
interest and vitality. Even academic education 
will emerge from an alliance with trade instruc- 

41 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

tion, strengthened, deepened, and dignified, and 
will but come more fully to its own. 

However the balance of power among scho- 
lastic principalities may settle itself after the 
new invasion, the world at large will reap sub- 
stantial benefits therefrom. Obviously, larger 
numbers of children will go through high school, 
numbers steadily increasing as the profitableness 
of trade education becomes manifest. Reason 
would prove the point beyond cavil had we not 
French experience with actual vocational schools 
to fall back upon.^ In 1905, the number of sec- 
ondary schools in France had quadrupled since 
the recent establishment of professional educa- 
tion ; the number of pupils had quintupled. This 
disproportional increase came almost entirely in 
the trade courses, which were, as they still are, so 
utterly inadequate to accommodate the demand 
that there has always been a long waiting-list. 
The ratio of graduates to first year enrollment 
proved correspondingly larger in these practical 
schools, and the comparatively high percentage 
of attendance was a sign of the favor the work 
found in the eyes of children and parents. 

This favor is principally due to the greater 
wage-earning capacity of the trade school grad- 

1 Rene Leblanc, V Enseignement Professionnel en France. 

42 



A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 

uate as compared with the young worker who 
has spent the same number of years in a shop. 
Suppose, for instance, that, of two boys who 
leave the primary school at thirteen, one goes at 
once to work in a furniture factory and begins to 
earn money for himself, and the other is sent for 
three years to the cabinetmakers' school. The 
young apprentice twits his comrade over the lat- 
ter's dependence, while he, young lordling of his 
franc or two a day, has money to spend. After a 
while, the other boy graduates from trade school 
and comes to work in the same shop with his 
friend. At first, he is a little slow and wasteful, 
not being used to the rush of competitive pro- 
duction and the economies of business. His wages, 
in the beginning, are lower than those of the 
more adroit apprentice, who twits him further on 
having been three years at school to learn a trade 
which he cannot practice so well as one who never 
had a day's more schooling than the law requires. 
But at the end of a year, the young graduate has 
caught up with trade conditions. He shows a re- 
markable intelligence and adaptability. He has 
ideas for this and that bit of decoration. A fel- 
low workman is sick and it develops that he can 
take the place, not so well as a skilled hand, but 
far better than the average apprentice. He is val- 

43 



THE PEOPLE^S SCHOOL 

uable to the shop and forges ahead, till, of a sud- 
den, the once scornful friend wakes up to the 
fact that he has been left far behind in the race 
for advancement, and that, while his own wages 
remain at much the same level, those of the trade 
school graduate are already in advance and show 
every prospect of further rise. The purchasing 
power of money is too different in France and 
America to make actual figures illuminating, but 
the gist of many tables is embodied in this sup- 
positious instance.^ 

The superior workmanship betokened by great- 
er wage-earning capacity is explained by compar- 
ing the training these two boys received. One 
was started and kept at work on some simple, 
easily acquired process, which he will go on per- 
forming for the rest of his days. The other has 
not only sharpened his wits by general instruc- 
tion, but studied his trade in all its bearings. He 
learned to know a dozen implements instead of 
one ; to understand a dozen operations. He fol- 
lowed the product from its inception in the mind 
of the designer to its completion and transfer to 
the school salesroom. He designed himself almost 
everything which came from his hand, and took 

1 For items see Pierre Brizon, Vapprentissage and the re- 
ports of the French Minister of Education. 

44 



A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 

that pride in the material expression of his own 
ideas that leads more surely than any other mo- 
tive to care and finish. Making a piece of furni- 
ture is more to him than a boresome stint to be 
done before coveted francs can be acquired. He 
has a personal, intelligent interest in his task. 
He can take hold of a new process with ready 
comprehension, and, when thrown out of work 
in one branch of the trade, he can fall back upon 
another. He is independent and destined to rise 
in his profession, just as surely as the average 
untrained worker is nailed to his first, poorly paid 
job, and so swells the class of the permanently 
unskilled who crowd the market and lower wages 
in good times, and in seasons of depression form 
that menacing, hungering army of the unem- 
ployed. 

Perhaps French workers may not have per- 
ceived all this ; but they have seen beyond a 
doubt that, because he can produce at once upon 
entering the shop, it is easy for the trade school 
graduate to get a job. No time need be wasted 
in breaking him in, for, in spite of his faults, he 
is not raw ; and though the verdict of employers 
is far from unanimous in all details, the consen- 
sus of opinion is that, if the trade school gradu- 
ate adapts himself to actual industrial conditions, 

45 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

he makes up for early lack of dexterity and, in 
the end, far outstrips all his competitors. Ger- 
man opinion has already crystallized into legisla- 
tion which renders industrial training obligatory, 
and in our own country many a scattering proof 
of the employer's recognition of its value is given 
by half-time classes for apprentices. 

Of course not every trade school graduate 
achieves complete success, for there is no magic 
in industrial training that can develop inferior 
endowments to a high level of efficiency. Hered- 
ity may be molded, but not eradicated. Yet the 
child of mean ability may perhaps receive from 
such education the greatest proportional benefit. 
As mental defectives are awakened through con- 
crete manual exercises, so the pupil of limited 
capacity may be roused by practical instruction 
to make the most of himself, and thus escape the 
failure that awaits undisciplined mediocrity. 

Trade education is not a paying investment for 
the individual only. " In the international struggle 
for commercial supremacy the balance must tip 
in favor of the land whose workers are most skill- 
ful and intelligent." With our toilers lies the stan- 
dard of national handicraft. It lies with them to 
support this standard against foreign labor at 
home and abroad. Not all the tariff bulwarks in 

46 



A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 

the world can forever protect us against the en- 
croachments of superior production. Dam the 
currents of industry as we will, they set inevitably 
toward quality. Germany has stolen the French 
market out of the very lap of protection. How 
gloriously "fit " must a nation be which can look 
forward to free trade, as many a wise judge of 
things maintains America is doing ! How sinewy 
in every limb, firm knit for the race, steady-eyed, 
bold-hearted, with no load of incompetence upon 
her shoulders ! Such a load, alas ! we shall carry 
so long as the sins of Europe are visited upon us 
by unchecked immigration and so long as we grind 
men and women to a worse semblance of things 
unhuman in our own factories, and make no effort 
to counteract by schooling the benumbing effects 
of unenlightened toil. 

No little contribution toward our national pros- 
perity will be that content with manual labor 
which should come from viewing it in school as 
a worthy end of intellectual study. Much slipshod 
service is now rendered by persons who look upon 
manual work as a mere stepping-stone to some- 
thing else, or as a makeshift for those who fail of 
rising higher. Woman's temporizing position in 
industry half explains her lower wages, and many 
a man fails of success because he gives inferior 

47 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

execution to what he deems inferior work. Man- 
ual labor is not a coil to be shuffled off at the first 
opportunity, but something that will remain with 
us always until we cease to need our bodies for 
other than vegetative purposes and become, as 
some pessimistic magazine scribbler has predicted, 
a degenerate human barnacle on the machinery 
by which we live. Rather than this, let us set all 
our writers plowing; our Rothschilds and Car- 
negies to hoeing beans ; and put fire to offices, 
libraries, schools, and the whole paraphernalia of 
finance and culture. There will always be work 
for hands to do, and the public welfare demands 
that the men who perform it be as manful as any 
other. Here, as elsewhere, we can afford to have 
no contemptuous slovens. 

To usher the young person into active life, 
equipped with the wherewithal to live, concerns 
not merely the economic efficiency of our workers; 
not merely the quality of production ; not merely 
our national supremacy in trade. It concerns the 
moral integrity of our people. Whenever the cor- 
ner stone of a new reform school is laid, the gods 
must ask each other laughingly, ** How many more 
Elmiras will it take to show these mortals that 
one trade school is worth six reformatories ? " 
Human interest is a crab which, crawling back- 

48 



A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 

ward, makes many a false start before it gains its 
end. Just now, it has taken a long look at crime, 
seen something very real and true about its causes, 
and, whirling round back end toward the goal of 
righteousness, has begun plowing away with ter- 
rific kickings and much flying-off of industrial sand 
and pebbles. But where is the queer fish coming 
out ? At the reformation of an ever-recruited band 
of criminals ! When a man has sinned, we see 
clearly the whys and wherefores ; see that most 
men fall into crime because they cannot make an 
honest living ; ^ resolve to teach the poor souls a 
trade; hurry them off to an Elmira in order to do 
it, and send them forth in seventy-four cases out 
of a hundred, completely reformed, with habits of 
application and a steady job. " A fine work!" 
says humanity; "a noble, inspiring work!" A 
noble work it is, and its best results will have been 
attained when the public has the genius — or 
common sense — to infer: if lack of a trade, if 
distaste for work, if habits of shiftlessness, bring 
a man to crime, why not teach a trade, why not 
give love for work, why not inculcate industry 
before the man becomes a criminal, and there- 
by save him and society the cost of sin ? The 

1 Only two per cent of criminals in Massachusetts prisons have 
a trade. 

49 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

criminal is a misfit. Alter him if you conveniently 
can, but cut out no more men on that pattern. 
Nay ; alter the pattern, if you must let the misfits 
go. The still unspoiled stuff of humanity is your 
paramount concern. Leave over patching and 
darning ragged individuals, and bethink you how 
you will save the whole ones from tatters. To keep 
the normal individual 7iormaly this is the problem 
of the social worker. 

"Everything," a witty lady once remarked, 
— " everything is done for ragamuffins, but my 
ordinary little boy has to struggle along as best 
he can." When we have learned to do for the 
ordinarily good and bright boy what we do, too 
late, for truant Jim and pilfering Joe, we shall 
find more than one probation officer drawing 
better pay at another job. The child now comes 
out of school at a critical age. Child labor laws 
may, at first, keep him out of work, or the cir- 
cumstances of his parents, coupled with lack of 
interest in any definite occupation, may lead him 
to idle away his most formative years. His youth^ 
condemns him at best to juvenile pursuits where 
employment is unsteady and the ever-shifting 
environment conduces to anything but applica- 

^ Boys are not wanted in skilled industries till they are six- 
teen. Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Training. 

50 



A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 

tion and firmness of character. If he lives in 
the city, he is subject to a thousand rapidly 
multiplying temptations. He is released from 
the discipline of the school and at the same time 
begins to have less respect for home restraints. 
Parents assume a different attitude toward him 
when he becomes a bread-winner. He has prac- 
tically no guidance, and the large increase in re- 
cent years in child criminality proves that he has 
often fallen a victim to his adventurous inex- 
perience. 

The case against child labor is too long and 
too well understood to bear repeating. Every 
one knows how much more heavily the strain of 
overwork tells upon children than upon adults. 
All need repose to repair waste tissue and expel 
the poison of fatigue. But the child must not 
only repair : he must build new tissue. No won- 
der that the growing boy or girl, confined for a 
long, hard day in a factory, falls speedily a prey 
to nervous and gastric troubles. No wonder his 
growth and intelligence are stunted, for the food 
which he consumes, the energy which generates 
within him, must go into work and systemic re- 
pairs, instead of into building new muscle and 
brain cells. In spite of all our knowledge and 
conviction, however, child labor laws fail of en- 

51 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

forcement for lack of complementary measures. 
But compulsory education, especially if extended 
beyond the grades, will never be effective until 
parents recognize that going to school is more 
profitable than immediate work. Until that time 
will they evade the law; and until children 
can actually gain increased wage-earning capa- 
city in the school, it will be an open question 
whether we can claim the right of compelling 
their attendance. How much more must this be 
true if school unfits them for their proper task! 
The social advantages of sojourn in the trade 
school are not merely negative. Watch a room- 
ful of children engaged in some practical work. 
How bright and eager they are! They are having 
a good time, as children have a right to do, even 
in school. The pleasure which children take in 
the practical part of their work spills over onto 
the rest of the course. They see the "hang of 
things" better. Their mathematics, drawing, and 
history have an obvious use — also less obvious 
ones of which they do not dream, but which func- 
tion quietly and surely. Unconsciously during 
the years while the child is learning his trade, 
he is developing inner resources of culture. He 
gets into his mind something to fill it in leisure 
moments, something to think about. Perhaps he 

52 



A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 

learns in English class to love reading, a dura- 
ble treasure that will last his lifetime. Not his 
the helpless, spoiled-baby type of mind which 
waits blankly to be entertained. He can amuse 
himself, and needs no tawdry picture show or 
corner saloon for recreation. His life is no longer 
flat and monotonous. His work is no longer 
deadening. He knows his machine as well as his 
work. He knows his materials, and as he toils 
mechanically, perhaps his mind follows them 
back to the mine or the jungles of the Amazon. 
Lives have been spent to get them ; life is spent 
to shape them. And when the factory has done 
with them, they will go here and there over 
the world, to pay life back for what they cost. 
He understands the whole process of manufac- 
ture in his shop, and labors, not as a blind pis- 
ton in the engine, but as a co-worker toward an 
intelligible end. Not mere dead wood and iron, 
but something live and real and interesting is 
passing through his hands ; something stimulat- 
ing withal. He is master of his tool, master of 
the iron hand ; and work becomes exhilarating. 
All of which is most fantastic, says the hard- 
head. Will the fellow make better nails for such 
untimely ruminations.? Certainly no worse ones; 
the business of nail-making leaving a great deal 

53 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

of room for thought, room better filled with fan- 
tasy than with mere echoes of hammering. 

Place in our times for fantasy there surely is; 
place for what is better and deeper — imagina- 
tion. There is, indeed, something ill-nourished 
in the aspect of modern life, an insipidity, a mo- 
notony of design, a thinness of texture in the 
tapestry which bespeaks weavers of meager soul. 
The richness of perception, the spontaneous joy 
in nature, the freshness of mind and heart, the 
bubbling, blossoming fullness of life wrought into 
the nai've scenes of an antique arras across which 
the Lady, the Lion, and the Unicorn move nobly 
and gayly through meadows full of stiffly grow- 
ing flowers and wee frisking animals ; the boun- 
tiful heaping-up of beauty in the wreathed frames 
of fruit and blossom which encircle the madon- 
nas of Delia Robbia ; the splendid lavishness of 
thought displayed in the tracery of a slim sword 
hilt from old Florence, — where does this find a 
counterpart among the products of our trades- 
people ? 

Of course a great deal of sentimental whimper- 
ing about the " good old times " has been done 
by pseudo-historical folk. Even a sturdy spirit 
like William Morris fell to dreaming over a golden 
age of England which was, in reality, leaden 

54 



A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 

enough. But all these plaints contain a kernel of 
justice. In the study of past ages, we look upon 
the oases and reclaimed land of character. That 
certain tracts were once desert is not the terrible 
thing, but that a tract, once fertile, should fall de- 
sert again. And in the light of the Italian Renais- 
sance ; indeed, to go no further back than our 
own day, in the light of the greater " resource- 
fulness " of continental as compared with Ameri- 
can environments, our daily life and all its ad- 
juncts smack dull and flat. The toiler must needs 
season his existence with the acrid vinegar of 
dissipation, lurid theatres, and yellow journal- 
ism. We sadly need to dream a bit at our work ; 
to vivify our common round. Nowadays, in every 
circle, we live in low relief. From Singapore to 
Paris, we wear the same cut of clothes, the same 
cut of thoughts. Ideas flatten themselves out 
thin as they diffuse over the globe. Convictions 
lose their depth and crispness. Even progressive 
Professor Royce, of Harvard, bewails the pas- 
sing of provincialism with the rich and stimulat- 
ing variety of mind and manners it insures. Uni- 
formity, the world-old bugbear, has stepped out 
of the cosmic closet to rattle its dry bones 
amongst us, and the whirring of factories is but 
music for its dancing. 

55 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

Against the leveling and numbing influence of 
industry, at least, the trade school would fight. 
Among men whose surroundings have stolen from 
them the right to even common thoughts, the 
trade school would work for a vast spiritual en- 
richment. In relation to their work, this deepen- 
ing of experience would be greatest. Though 
trade instruction could not break down the thick 
walls of specialization, could not bring the man 
into closer physical relation to the finished pro- 
duct of his toil, it could tie him to it by a firm 
bond of understanding. It would open up to him 
a world of thought where he dreamed no thought 
existed. It would interest him in a world of homely 
things which now he deems unworthy of his inter- 
est, in stocks and stones and bars of steel. And it 
would teach him to express himself in these ma- 
terials of industry, putting into them the fancy, the 
feeling, the loving care which would make our 
articles of commerce justify their etymology by 
being truly things of beauty, "bits of art." 



TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 

The great question mark with which to-day punc- 
tuates many an ancient usage is largest and 
blackest after the word woman. "The Wo- 
man Problem," "The Family," "The Economic 
Dependence of Woman " are expressions which 
stand daily in the press, which fall daily from the 
lips of preachers and lecturers ; and the increasing 
urgency of the cry, " Votes for Women," proves 
that some readjustment is necessary if balance 
amid present unrest is to be preserved. 

Discussion of the woman question rages hottest 
about the point which links it to our subject of 
trade education. What the woman's rights advo- 
cate calls the economic dependence of female on 
male, or, in simple terms, the fact that the aver- 
age girl must marry to make a living, is said to 
have caused the age-long subjection of woman to 
man. Just as the monopolist employer can defi- 
nitely fix living conditions for the workers in his 
trade, so have men, since the beginning of time, 
ordered matrimony and the life of woman after 

57 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

their own liking. To keep women docile in their 
semi-slavery, their development as individuals has 
been subintentionally retarded by their masters. 
Now, however, that education has penetrated the 
feminine ranks, discontent breaks forth. The his- 
tory of all slave rebellions repeats itself. Women 
have come into greater knowledge and are de- 
manding freedom. Against this wall between wo- 
man and freedom, the efforts of reformers bat- 
ter with deadliest energy. To hang no longer on 
a future husband for a livelihood has seemed to 
the harassed and downtrodden female the open 
sesame to self-respect and liberty. But economic 
dependence of some sort she can never escape. 
Every one, whether man or woman, is econ- 
omically dependent, — on an employer, on a cor- 
poration, on consumers, or on the general public. 
The real point of difficulty is that in woman's 
legitimate trade, progress has been barred. The 
homemaker, housekeeper, and mother often lose 
touch with the currents of contemporary life and 
fail completely of being " human beings " be- 
cause all their effort and time are consumed in 
laboriously performing the operations of their 
trade in the same unsystematic, wasteful manner 
in use in the Middle Ages. Because of this fail- 
ure of the household to keep pace with general 

58 



TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 

industrial and social development, women have 
begun to find it too restrictive. They recognize 
that they are being cut off from fullness of ex- 
perience by so-called home duties, and are refus- 
ing, in many cases, to enter an unprogressive 
employment whose ante-diluvian methods of 
work kill personality and efficiency at once. 

Of course the question is infinitely more com- 
plicated than the above statement would imply, 
just as life is deeper than the outline drawings 
whereby we explain its forms. A psychological 
factor has helped to keep housekeeping a rudi- 
mentary social organ, and to prevent woman 
from escaping out of this atrophying business 
into any other. Nature combined with the sel- 
fishness of men in this regard. It is natural for 
a woman to be a mother, and she is willing to 
make a great many sacrifices to secure this end. 
But when at last she awakened to a recognition 
of the fact that her sacrifices were unfitting her 
for motherhood ; when she saw that by remain- 
ing a household slave, chained forever to the un- 
skilled work of a slave, she was thereby sacrific- 
ing her children as well as herself, then woman 
felt no longer her previous satisfaction in moth- 
erhood at all costs. She began to remember, like 
Ibsen's Nora, that first of all she was a human 

59 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

being with the right and the duty of life. She per- 
ceived that to be fully human preceded all func- 
tions, however proper, which belong to a human 
being. "This business of motherhood can wait 
till I am fit for it," she thought. "First, I must 
breathe and move and think as becomes a woman 
and not a drudge. Drudge in mind and body.*^ 
Drudge and mother? The terms are mutually 
exclusive ! I will set about escaping drudgery." 

Set about it she has and in deadly earnest. 
She has gone to work in industry where she ex- 
pects to be treated as a twentieth-century indi- 
vidual. The domestic servant is withdrawing 
her protection against kitchen work. Woman 
forms trade unions and battles manfully for 
justice. She organizes women's clubs. She agi- 
tates for the ballot. 

Not all of her methods are so praiseworthy. She 
escapes marital obligations by divorce. She avoids 
bearing children. She avoids marriage altogether, 
or, once married, manages her home so poorly 
that it might as well not exist : witness the mere 
fact that in New York City the largest percent- 
age of undernourished school-children come from 
moderately well-to-do families ^ ; and witness also 
the number of incorrigible children voluntarily 

1 Investigation by the Board of Health, 1907. 
60 



TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 

surrendered to our juvenile courts by respectable 
parents. 

Thus the lack of progressive intelligence in 
homekeeping has had the twofold result of driv- 
ing the woman out of the home in protest against 
its narrowness, and of frequently making the 
home and the family institution, as we know it, a 
failure. But if, as we hear nowadays ad nauseaniy 
the family is the essential social unit ; then it is 
not against marriage, not against that economic 
dependence of women which has been so cruelly 
exploited, that the fundamental reformer must 
struggle. Family life needs modernization. The 
present industrial employment and the contin- 
ued unmarried state of so many women may be 
viewed as an unorganized strike against the injur- 
ious labor conditions in their proper trade. It is a 
necessary protest against wrong — but, a tem- 
porary condition which will pass away when right 
is once established. 

The integrity of the family depends, first, 
upon modifying the form of the institution to 
allow woman human freedom, and, second, upon 
recognition of the fact that family life is a fit 
scene for the play of intelligence. Woman's edu- 
cation should be designed " not to lead her per- 
manently away from the home, but to teach her 

6i 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

how to bring the best from the outside world 
into the home." The first step is the mechan- 
ical one^ — to bring homekeeping methods up to 
date, and so leave the mother a little leisure for 
life contacts. 

Here is the mission of the domestic science 
courses for girls. Housework need be drudgery 
no longer when intelligence and system are in- 
troduced into it. The application of scientific 
study to domestic economy may perhaps do for 
the whole industry the same thing which science 
has done for every other line of modern business. 
Perhaps much of the purely mechanical work will 
be taken over by machinery or by special agen- 
cies. "Where one woman now uses a potato-parer, 
meat-grinder, bread-maker, biscuit-ringer, auto- 
matic cleaner, dish-washer or washing-machine, 
instead of the simple knives, choppers, bread- 
boards, irons, brooms, pans, washboards, and 
human hands of our forefathers, everyhousehold 
will boast these conveniences and many another." 
Perhaps we may come to the conclusion that for 
a woman in every kitchen in every dwelling in 
every block in a city street to spend the same 
hour performing an operation, which one of them 
could perform for the whole block by means of 
a simple machine, is an unwarrantable waste of 

62 



TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 

time, strength, and mentality. The thought of a 
dozen women steaming and stewing over a dozen 
dinners which could, in many respects, be better 
cooked by one alone, may drive us to cooperative 
housekeeping of some hitherto unheard-of kind. 
One hesitates to predict what the future will 
bring forth in a field so hedged about with thorny 
prejudice and with real difficulties. But that 
some simplification of housework must take place 
is so certain that the particular form may safely 
be left for the specialist to discover. 

Mere simplification is not enough : we must 
persuade woman that housekeeping is interest- 
ing. Women have been trying to escape from 
housework because they see in it no scope for the 
imagination. When the drudgery is obsolete and 
housekeeping is recognized and taught as a 
science, the four walls of a home will no longer 
be a prison for the ambitious wife, but a labor- 
atory to which she brings for testing all the most 
progressive thought of the world. 

It is not in the sphere of domestic economy 
alone that the trained woman will find room for 
deepest study. The education of her children can 
much less afford to be haphazard than the order- 
ing of her kitchen. The illuminating distinction 
between efficiency and passive goodness is no- 

63 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

where better shown than among mothers. How 
many little monsters grow up under the care of 
merely ''good women"! How many weaklings! 
How many stunted natures ! When Hamlet asks 
the prying emissaries of his uncle to play upon 
a recorder, Guildenstern replies, " Believe me, 
I cannot. I know no touch of it, my lord. I have 
not the skill." 

Then Hamlet : "Why, look you now, how un- 
worthy a thing you make of me ! You would 
play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, 
you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, 
you would sound me from my lowest note to the 
top of my compass ; and there is much music, 
excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot 
you make it speak ! 'Sblood I do you think that 
I am easier to be played on than a pipe ? " 

No one would dream of trying so simple a 
thing as piano playing without practice, but to 
nourish costly human bodies, to build a precious 
human life — for this, instinct must suffice. Mo- 
ther love may be omnipotent in romantic fiction, 
but it will never tell the ignorant woman to scald 
her baby's milk bottle unless she knows the dan- 
gers of unscalded bottles ; and all the fondness 
in the world, and even all the old-fashioned skill 
at making individual dishes, will not tell her how 

64 



TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 

to set a nourishing meal before her children un- 
less she knows something of the ingredients of 
food and the chemical needs of the body. If a 
teacher must study for years to instruct the child 
an hour a day in some limited subject, how much 
more careful training must the person require 
who is to control the child during its earliest and 
most formative years, give it character, and mold 
its whole attitude toward life? The realms of 
psychology, philosophy, history, literature, biol- 
ogy, and hygiene must be exhausted to give the 
growing child his due. No mere grown-up know- 
ledge of these subjects will suffice. The princi- 
ples of child growth and of child pyschology 
must be conned by the mother no less carefully 
than by the teacher. She must know the mater- 
ial with which she works ; know its laws. She 
must be an expert, for no race was ever greater 
than its mothers. 

New York City has at length discovered that 
more than love is needed in rearing children, 
and has not only instituted courses for young 
mothers, but sends a nurse into tenement houses, 
where a new baby has come, to instruct the 
mother by word and example as to its proper 
care. Would it not save public expense as well 
as babies to give this training earlier and to every 

6s 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

woman ? I know it is the practice in some circles 
to scoff at mothers' classes and mothers' clubs. 
Like alchemists of old before science reached a 
solid basis, many members of mothers' clubs try 
not a few ludicrous and fantastic experiments. 
But the greenness of their wisdom is not the im- 
portant thing. It is a hopeful sign that they have 
begun to think about the question at all. 

You mother who never punished your child 
unjustly in anger and so undermined his respect 
for your judgment and authority — I do not write 
for you. You other mother who never humored 
the baby at your breast and lost him forever, or 
during years of bitter struggle, that great gift 
of self-control, you too have, perhaps, been in- 
telligent without set instruction in the mysteries 
of human growth. But how many of us are in- 
telligent ? Do not think of yourself, O reader 
who were born wise! but of Mrs. X, who has 
just left the room, and who, we all know, was 
born foolish and yet accepts with easy-going 
complacency the responsibility of children up to 
any number the *' Lord may provide." 

Are the domestic science and motherhood 
courses the only trade instruction desirable for 
girls > What will be the effect on them of busi- 
ness and industrial training ? Will this tend 

66 



TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 

merely to increase the army of single women, to 
entrench woman more firmly in every form of 
industry and make her so contented in her self- 
supporting existence that she will be slow to ex- 
change her freedom for the necessary depend- 
ence and limitations of a child-bearing woman ? 
The answer is yes and no ! Fortunately the 
author has no wish to dogmatize as to particular 
methods in a case where so little experimentation 
has been done. It is possible that the practice of 
housekeeping will so evolve that all women need 
not cook and sew just because they are women. 
This question of the woman in industry is a 
difficulty which must be frankly acknowledged. 
It is well that women are able to support them- 
selves. Many a rash marriage, many an uncon- 
genial one is prevented by the independence 
with which a wage-earning woman can await her 
happiness. Women also find in pre-marital years 
of wage-earning, a disciplinary training in or- 
derly, methodical habits which is invaluable to a 
future wife and mother whose autocratic position 
in the household might tempt her to unsystematic 
work. ** It is noticeable," says Helen Bosanquet,^ 
" that girls who are engaged in skilled industries 
are better fitted for their home duties afterwards 

* Helen Bosanquet, The Family. 

67 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

than girls engaged in rough and unskilled work." 
And surely better fitted than untrained girls pre- 
viously occupied at nothing ! 

Yet the hard-headed man sometimes objects 
that a program for thorough trade education 
may suit boys, who are a stable industrial factor, 
but that it is useless to teach a girl her whole 
trade, because she so seldom needs it. The ques- 
tion is more than economic ; such instruction 
trains her mind to unified thinking — a habit 
surely priceless whether the concrete problems 
of her trade are of further use to her or not. 

Viewed, however, from the economic side, the 
question of the woman in industry is seen to be 
more than training for a brief business career to 
be terminated by marriage. It is roughly esti- 
mated that at least fifty per cent of women 
workers are over twenty-five years of age. This 
indicates five to ten years previously spent in 
wage-earning, and suggests that no small propor- 
tion of this fifty per cent will continue indefin- 
itely self-supporting. For these women life pre- 
sents a masculine problem, and the trades upon 
which their future safety and comfort depend 
must be taught well at all hazards, even if time 
forces the sacrifice of strictly feminine branches. 
Better do well one thing and that the most ur- 

68 



TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 

gent, than half perform two tasks, however im- 
portant the second may appear. The principles 
laid down in this chapter stand as our ideal ; but 
education, like politics, must be wisely oppor- 
tunist. We cannot deny the fact that many 
women are engaged not in their natural trade, 
but in a multitude of industrial and mercantile 
pursuits ; and common sense demands that school- 
ing should prepare them unequivocally for what 
they do instead of for what some one may think 
they ought to do. 

Even the girl to whom industry is but a tem- 
porary means of livelihood presents a more com- 
plicated problem than that of her own personal 
welfare. From the Kansas City Labor Herald 
we quote a union man's opinion that, " When we 
consider the fact that the average time worked 
by a woman or girl is computed as five years, it 
is easy to see that a long apprenticeship cannot 
be served, and any school training which will as- 
sist her to earlier efficiency must be favorably 
received by us." May not the industrial tran- 
sient be worth training for the sake of those with 
whose wages she competes } Not industry alone 
would profit by the greater capacity of its women 
workers which would follow the opening of trade 
schools for girls. Every worker, man or woman, 

69 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

would profit thereby, for at present the most 
ruinous competition with which skilled labor 
meets is the cheap unskilled labor of women. 
Because they are untrained, women can command 
only the lowest wages ; because they are untrained, 
they fall quickly into cheap specialties and do not 
raise their wages ; because they are untrained in 
mind as well as in hand, their trade union organi- 
zations are not usually compact enough for power ; 
and because they often take a temporizing view 
of labor, which no instruction overcomes by in- 
terest in the thing itself, they care little about 
self-improvement and are so uncertain a factor in 
industry that their lower wage is explained if not 
excused from the employer's point of view. 

From whatever standpoint we survey the 
matter, it presents one unchanging aspect. That 
women are in industry to stay — as a class if not 
as individuals — seems an established fact. And 
so long as they are in industry, they deserve as 
adequate training for their tasks as men. 

Two other arguments for vocational training 
of women (whether domestic or industrial) force 
themselves upon our notice. As has been said in 
another connection, trade schools ought to secure 
a respectful attitude toward work. If more of 
our young women took some personal interest in 

70 



TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 

housework ; if more of them were trained to man- 
age a house economically and even to do the work 
well and expeditiously themselves, they would be 
willing and able to marry on less and begin more 
simply than many a young person now thinks of 
doing in some walks of life. Thus perhaps some 
of the justly deplored late marriages, with their 
correspondingly decreased birth rate, might be 
avoided. Our ethical concept has in this case 
gone in advance of the biological evolution. We 
must not try to force it too far ahead, or nature 
will pull us up short rein by some signal warning. 

The problem of late marriage is bound up 
closely with a still graver question upon which 
trade education should have an even deeper and 
better influence — that travesty of marriage, pro- 
stitution. Prostitution is a survival of primitive 
polygamy and later concubinage, monogamy as 
a type having been slow of development, being 
still, indeed, far from perfectly developed in hu- 
man ideals and conduct. And modern social or- 
ganization impedes its development in many 
ways; nay, almost inevitably prolongs the bar- 
baric system amongst us. 

How } 

Prostitutes may be classified as : (i) Naturally 
depraved ; (2) girls who have been betrayed and 

71 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

left helpless ; (3) girls who have a strong distaste 
for work ; (4) girls who, through inefficiency or 
underpay, cannot earn by legitimate means enough 
to live. The last groups are larger than one likes 
to think, because their sin is so manifestly the 
fault of the society which has allowed them to 
grow up untrained in the matters whereon their 
life and safety depend, and which purchases its lux- 
uries a little cheaper by the sacrifice of some under- 
paid sales-clerk, sewing-woman, or factory girl. 

Before these unfortunates have drifted to wreck 
on the shores of our city life, the trade school 
will come to their aid. The indolent girl who de- 
spises labor will there learn that work is honor- 
able, and will conceive an intelligent interest in 
some worthy pursuit. The inefficient girl may ac- 
quire industrious, regular habits and become able 
to earn her livelihood. If she has an excitable, 
unsteady temperament, application to practical 
work should give her better poise and at least 
some permanent interest to counterbalance her 
fever for excitement. It is the old question of 
prevention or cure ; trade or reform schools. The 
young learner would find her dangerous period 
of almost unremunerative apprenticeship materi- 
ally shortened by attendance upon a trade con- 
tinuation school, because, when working and 

72 



TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 

studying simultaneously, she could forge ahead 
more rapidly toward the point where earnings and 
expenditures balance. For the woman who is so 
underpaid that she cannot live or cannot dress in 
accordance with the requirements of her trade, or 
whose average salary gives her no chance for the 
recreation and pleasure which a healthy nature 
craves, there are only two lines of hope: self- 
help through trade union organization, and public 
opinion which shall refuse to patronize business 
concerns that underpay their women. For trade 
union action, intelligent workers are required. 
We have, alas ! no quicker nostrum for the crea- 
tion of that social sense in which all prostitutes 
will find their chief salvation than slow education 
of the public to a better understanding of the 
dangers and terrors of this evil which menaces 
not merely the health, happiness, and morality 
of a fraction of our women, but the whole future 
stamina of our race. But we maintain that, in 
the present state of chaos and difficulty, the 
Vocational School will be a great help and a pow- 
erful deterrent for the girl whom unguided cir- 
cumstance now throws into the undertow of civili- 
zation, since it will give every girl an honorable 
pride in independence and the ability to keep her- 
self independent. 



VI 

IN THE COUNTRY 

"Agriculture underlies all industries and draws upon all 
sciences." — Wickson.1 

In the preceding chapters we have spoken of 
the seven million or more persons who are en- 
gaged in American industry. There is an even 
larger class for whom the vocational school would 
be invaluable — the farmers. One third of our 
population still lives upon the land ; and many 
more than the ten and a half million agricultural 
workers enumerated by the last census can and 
will sooner or later turn to the country for sup- 
port. 

But in spite of this preponderance of rural 
population, our civilization is distinctly metro- 
politan. The current of modern improvement 
has served to draw country districts nearer and 
nearer the city. The city, on the other hand, 
overflows its suburbs and covers the country 
with a thin metropolitan veneer. This is inimical 
to the growth of a healthy country life rooted in 

1 Mr. Wickson in Cyclopedia of American Agriculture, 

74 



IN THE COUNTRY 

the soil and drawing therefrom spirit and sus- 
tenance, for, in fact as in fiction, there is a genu- 
ine pastoral element, which has its own laws 
of development, and which is too precious to 
smother under any city-made mantle of pro- 
gress. 

The disappointing inapplicability of our long 
cherished idyllic theory of country life to the 
bare, hard round of drudgery which its reality 
discloses, has helped to retard our appreciation 
of this element. Probably there is no more fruit- 
ful field for social work than the village, particu- 
larly the old established village. The human 
stock needs replenishing. Existence is stagna- 
tion. There is no society — how can there be 
where there is no continual supply of fresh in- 
terests to interchange ? — and since the school- 
ing of the average country child stops early, he 
never acquires those inward resources which 
solitude demands. Owing also to this lack of 
education, country districts resent innovation, 
and are slow to improve their methods of work 
and conditions of living. 

The youth and energy of the country has 
found the path of least resistance to be quitting 
rather than reconstructing country life. Thus 
we have seen in the last fifty years an exodus 

75 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

cityward, and westward, which has produced the 
twofold result of city congestion and under-de- 
velopment of rural resources. This exodus has 
been stimulated by educational ideals as well as 
by economic pressure. Little has been done by 
the schools to make farming seem an oppor- 
tunity for ambition and talent. Few educational 
and cultural advantages have been available for 
the farmer, whereas the city is in itself a lib- 
eral education. The largeness of urban life has 
seemed intimately bound up with its superior 
business opportunities. The introduction of farm 
machinery, and the factory production of much 
which was formerly made in the household, has 
greatly reduced the demand for country labor ; 
hired help find their uncertain and at best un- 
steady employment more and more unsatisfac- 
tory and are easily tempted to the comparatively 
sure and continuous work of industry. Because 
of discriminative transportation rates to larger 
centers, industry has left the small towns, re- 
moving not only the demand for workmen, but 
also the market for farm products, to the distant 
city. With this decline in the home market, the 
less desirable land can no longer compete with 
fertile regions, and many farms in New England, 
New York, and even Ohio, have been aban- 



IN THE COUNTRY 

doned. The farmer has either gone to the city, 
or pushed westward where land is new, cheap, 
and more plentiful, and intensive methods are 
not yet necessary in order to produce a crop. 
But now that our new territory is taken up, while 
at the same time our population steadily increases 
and a larger food supply is daily becoming neces- 
sary, we must expect a change. Much abandoned 
land will again be brought under cultivation, 
much exhausted land will be reenriched, and 
more careful, scientific agriculture will develop. 
Education is already paving the way to the 
reconstruction of farming methods, but education 
has as yet touched only the overseer, the gentle- 
man farmer. As Dean David Kinley puts it, 
education is lifting farming from the grade of 
manual labor to that of a technical calling or 
profession. Schools of agriculture are gradually 
raising their standards of admission until aca- 
demically they stand or expect to stand on the 
same level with engineering colleges. With such 
institutions this discussion is not concerned. We 
stand for the plain man ; the average workman, 
the average small farmer or even farm hand. 
He too needs training if agriculture is to form a 
trustworthy substructure for our industrial civil- 
ization. 

77 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

Neglecting to train our farmers means as basic 
and certain a destruction of natural resources 
and reduction of national prosperity as the de- 
molition of every forest. The soil is our funda- 
mental support. We are its creatures ; our fac- 
tories are busy with its products ; indeed, human 
life is little more than shaping what the soil 
supplies us in a formless state. Who is the keeper 
of this life-giving mother earth ? The farmer. 
And what have we done to make sure that he 
will not kill the goose that lays our golden egg ? 
We have a habit of educating those who perform 
the secondary human functions ; but the vital 
primary ones are left entirely to untutored im- 
pulse. 

The nature of farm work renders special train- 
ing for it imperative. Though the division between 
labor and capital is at length asserting itself in 
this field, the farmer's work is usually self-di- 
rected and unspecialized. Upon one man depends 
the success of many acres. He must understand 
trade upon trade, drawing from all the sciences 
alike, sending out ramifications into every depart- 
ment of knowledge. An acquaintance with local 
soil and climate and their bearing on crop raising ; 
with the chemistry of soil and crops ; with ways of 
preventing depletion of the soil through exhaus- 

78 



IN THE COUNTRY 

tion and erosion ; with the principles of drainage 
and irrigation, and of animal and plant physiology, 
care and breeding ; with the pests and diseases 
which attack vegetation and the methods of fight- 
ing them, — these are but a few things upon which 
the successful farmer or even intelligent farm 
worker can scarcely afford to be ignorant. Yet all 
of these are topics for which widely diversified in- 
struction is necessary, topics whose frontier of 
knowledge is rapidly advancing and for which no 
hereditary or legendary information can suffice. 
Finally, successful farming demands a far-seeing 
and daring mind. The saving from a larger outlay 
which may increase the net profits in far greater 
proportion is a subject upon which the untrained 
rustic is hard to convince. Perhaps even more 
difficult to understand is the point where the law 
of diminishing returns becomes operative, the 
point beyond which intensive methods do not 
bring a paying return. 

*' The increasing capitalization of agriculture 
necessary to secure the greatest long-run profits 
is putting agriculture more and more into the 
hands of educated men of means. Capitalization 
always places a premium upon intelligence," is 
the dictum of Dean Davenport. Unless we edu- 
cate all farmers instead of merely those gentle- 

79 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

men farmers who find their way to our colleges 
and universities, the inevitable development we 
have already witnessed in industry may also 
be expected in farming ; and we may anticipate 
a twentieth-century feudalism in land ownership 
and the rise of an agrarian proletariat. In mani- 
pulating this proletarian labor, those same prob- 
lems which now obtrude themselves in connec- 
tion with unskilled industrial labor may be ex- 
pected to present themselves. 

That we may forestall such a consummation ; 
that we may never come to carry such a burden 
of agrarian as of industrial incompetence ; that 
the national farming resources may be most fully 
and conservatively developed ; and that the ex- 
travagant exhaustion of our fertile soil by unen- 
lightened cultivation may no longer continue, 
the United States needs some systematic agri- 
cultural education which shall reach every rural 
inhabitant. 

It is difficult to determine what form of agri- 
cultural training should be introduced into coun- 
try schools, but certain principles to govern such 
instruction may safely be predicated. Professor 
Earle Barnes makes a suggestive distinction be- 
tween educative and uneducative work. " Work 
ceases to be educative when we have mastered 

80 



IN THE COUNTRY 

it completely, when its processes have become 
purely reflex and it ceases to engage our thought." 
It is not alone mechanical work, such as that 
of the ticket chopper, which soon loses all edu- 
cative value. Any task in which the worker 
does not continually find new outlooks widening 
before him, in which he does not every day re- 
adjust his mental viewpoint to meet some new 
contingency, in which (to borrow from nature 
an expression of the perfect adaptation to en- 
vironment which precludes further progress) 
he vegetates — any such task is not merely 
uneducative but stultifying as well. Work may 
become uneducative without being thoroughly 
mastered if its thought possibilities are undevel- 
oped by the worker ; and it is just here that the 
country schools must strive for the uplift of rural 
intelligence. The ** hay-seed " is not a hay-seed 
because he comes from the country, but because 
humanly, intellectually, he has vegetated and 
gone to seed. 

To open up to the farm population the cultural 
value of their work is the first object of the 
country school ; and this can be done only by 
giving rural education a new direction and alter- 
mg Its ideal. The same subjects may be taught, 
but they will be taught in terms of the country. 

8i 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

The grammar grades should most emphatically 
not attempt to give training in general farming 
methods or in agricultural theory. Children are 
interested in concrete vital phenomena, not in 
laws, and nature study should be used to excite 
the intelligent interest of the pupils in the life 
about them. But the manual training for these 
elementary grades might have a local and prac- 
tical bearing. In place of the purely formal exer- 
cises so common in schoolrooms, the class might 
draw subject-matter from practical problems of 
the farm, and build fences, drains, and roadways 
instead of constructing useless wood, paper, or 
metal objects. The school-garden is an infinite 
resource ; and could be made practical by select- 
ing for successive years the different crops suit- 
able to the locality. 

In addition to freshening the grammar grades 
in country schools with a breath of the woods 
and hills, and with the scent of good red earth ; 
in addition to turning the child's mind toward the 
beauty and wonder of the natural world, we must 
also give him special training for his life work. 
This will begin in the high school. 

This school must of course offer general aca- 
demic branches, as these are the prerequisites 
of farming intelligence. But in addition to this 

82 



IN THE COUNTRY 

general information and mental drill, the agri- 
cultural problems of the locality should be cov- 
ered. As Liberty Hyde Bailey justly declares, 
the country high school must not attempt to do 
superficially what the college does exhaustively. 
Let it eschew broad and theoretic surveys and 
do thorough work on definite, significant local 
problems. 

In both grammar and high schools, also, vari- 
ous academic branches can be given a distinctly 
vocational turn without detracting from their 
value as mind trainers or sources of information. 
Geography, like charity, may well begin at home ; 
the farm, village, township, county, state, nation, 
and continent seems a logical order of study. 
Map drawing would in this way assume a won- 
derful vitality by having a basis in visible things. 
In geography, as it is often taught, we see the 
grown-up impulse to present a subject analyt- 
ically, symmetrically. But the natural progress 
of child thought is from the known to the un- 
known. Comprehensive unity the child cannot 
appreciate ; but coherence of the new with the 
familiar is needed to maintain interest. Arith- 
metic can easily deal with farm problems. Choice 
of reading, too, is a fruitful field. Why should 
not the English course include books which 

83 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

bring out the wealth of rural life ? — not books 
that sentimentalize over the country ; pupils 
will be quick to detect the false and artificial 
note, — but those which impart a new and deeper 
meaning to nature, which open up rural oppor- 
tunities heretofore undreamed of, and give an 
impulse toward creative thinking about his en- 
vironment that will endure beyond school years 
and make the farmer's life a growth and a con- 
tinual education. 

The movement for better rural education is 
already widespread. Practically every state in 
the Union has farmers* institutes designed to 
arouse interest in scientific agriculture and to 
popularize scientific treatment of especially im- 
portant farm problems. The National Depart- 
ment of Agriculture and many state departments 
are unflagging in disseminating literature and 
giving consultation. Experiment stations have 
given incalculable stimulus to up-to-date farming 
in adjoining districts. Colleges of agriculture are 
everywhere enlarging their extension work to 
include lectures on agriculture, traveling schools, 
and one, two, and three week courses held either 
at the college or throughout the state. Minne- 
sota, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Wis- 
consin, Alabama, Georgia, and New York have 

84 



IN THE COUNTRY 

promising systems of so-called agricultural 
schools of the high school type, and in many 
other states agricultural courses have been added 
to the curricula of existing high schools. An ex- 
tensive effort is being made to equip elementary 
school-teachers for presenting agricultural sub- 
jects. In thirteen states, teaching of agriculture 
in rural schools is required by law, while in thirty- 
one it is encouraged. Gardening is becoming a 
feature in many progressive schools, and, though 
the experiment is limited in extent, it is unlim- 
ited in results, as is proved by the social and 
moral effect of the gardens in De Witt Clinton 
Park, New York, in Weccacoe Square, Philadel- 
phia, and in Dayton, Ohio. It is a curious fact, 
however, that school-gardening has been largely 
confined to city schools and betterment agencies, 
and that its educational and practical value in 
rural communities has been little recognized. 
Where gardening is not done in connection 
with school-work, home gardening for boys and 
girls is widely encouraged by the competitive 
corn and tomato clubs. The general interest in 
nature study, which even extravagant faddists 
have not been able to discredit, is our longest 
step forward in the way of better rural school- 
ing, because it means a transforming of the 

8s 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

spirit and a redirecting of the method of edu- 
cation. 

Marvelous and inspiring as are the strides 
which the movement for agricultural education 
has made and is making in the United States, 
we must not allow them to blind us to the fact 
that, after all, we do not insure to every farmer 
adequate preparation for his work. The special 
college of agriculture is out of the question for 
the average country boy. Little use is made of 
rural common schools as training for farm life 
and the agricultural high school is still a rarity. 
"Probably not one farmer in twenty-five ever 
attends a farmers' institute." ^ A somewhat 
larger fraction, but still a fraction, read intelli- 
gently the government bulletins. The short 
courses and special lectures offered by institutes 
and colleges are not and cannot be a systematic 
preparation for agriculture. They merely solve 
the concrete difficulties of farming for the per- 
son who has already encountered them in prac- 
tice. The fundamental, thorough, and comprehen- 
sive system which shall give us a competent rural 
population has not yet been evolved. Yet this 
preliminary agitational work is an invaluable test 
of the feasibility of scientific agricultural train- 

^ Report of U. S. Bureau of Education^ 1909, chap. XI. 

'^6 



IN THE COUNTRY 

ing, prepares the public mind for the adoption 
of an adequate system, and should determine 
the exact form to be assumed by such a system. 
We are, so to speak, breaking up and preparing 
the soil for the new educational crop. 

Other countries have gone further than we in 
the matter. France has established schools of 
agriculture in every province, schools which have 
encountered a great deal of local prejudice, but 
which are raising French farming to a higher 
level of efficiency. Belgium has followed and im- 
proved upon French example. The name of Swit- 
zerland is synonymous with scientific agriculture ; 
and while an American is poor on five acres a Ger- 
man would be independent. The disparity cannot 
be explained away by the different standards of 
living. It is partly traceable to the new effort 
on the part of German, and notably Prussian 
organizations, to educate the farmer for his voca- 
tion. Austria has over one hundred and ninety- 
five schools in which agricultural subjects are 
taught. Holland and Denmark show an equally 
advanced attitude toward agricultural training, 
and in the British Isles, the movement is gain- 
ing ground. In England and Wales, itinerant 
lecturers under the auspices of the county coun- 
cils go out from the university or agricultural 

^7 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

college center to give instruction to local classes 
extending over several weeks. Special problems, 
such as milk handling, are discussed through- 
out one course. These instructors also supervise 
the work done in local agricultural continuation 
courses, night classes, and popular lectures, and 
they advise about the management of the gar- 
dens which are becoming a more and more com- 
mon feature of English country schools. 

Canada uses the school-garden to good effect. 
Her rural schools have regular courses in agri- 
culture supplemented by work on an experiment 
farm. The advantages of rotating crops, of fertil- 
ization, of proper choice and care of seed are il- 
lustrated in the most conclusive manner by main- 
taining two sets of fields for every point to be 
proved. In one field crops are rotated during a 
certain term of years, while that adjoining is 
planted year after year to the same crop and soil 
exhaustion becomes evident in the inferiority of 
its yields. One crop is adequately fertilized ; the 
adjoining one is not ; and the pupil has ocular 
proof of what increase in net profit the greater 
outlay has produced. One field will be sowed 
with new, selected, fumigated seed ; the adjoin- 
ing one with old seed. This system is revolution- 
izing Canadian farming, and is making of our 

88 



IN THE COUNTRY 

sister republic on the north a dangerous poten- 
tial competitor for future American food mar- 
kets. 

The question of agricultural education is, how- 
ever, in the last analysis more than economic. 
We need it not so much that we may raise more 
corn and wine, but that we may raise better men 
and women in our country districts. Any work 
is to be judged rather by the human being it de- 
velops than by its material output. And the hu- 
man resources of country life, we have as yet 
neglected. Our rural populations are not rooted 
to the soil. The country road which passes by 
the author's ancestral home shows scarce a fam- 
ily which has lived more than twenty years upon 
the land. Most of the places have changed hands 
within the past ten years. New names, new faces 
— a continual flux ! And what of the neighbor- 
hood which for a century has not outgrown this 
fluid transitional stage ? Barren of association, 
barren of traditional ideals, what formative influ- 
ence can it exert upon the character of its people 1 
What love or respect can they have for its beau- 
ties ? What intelligent policy of conservation can 
this shifting population maintain ? The land is 
harried by a succession of transient farmers ; its 
woods are leveled ; its hills unveiled. Their past 

89 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

is dead; their future, a matter of indifference. 
The farmer's sole thought is to get all he can at 
any cost ; he, too, will soon move on. 

The life of such a place is raw and tasteless ; 
it lacks the mellow savor of a community which 
has been a slow accretion of all that was best 
and most enduring in many decades of human 
growth. It lacks social solidarity ; it lacks stan- 
dards. Its language has no earthy tang ; its bad 
grammar never rises to the dignity of dialect. 
Perhaps such a neighborhood escapes the stag- 
nation of the isolated village where a static inbred 
population is year by year deteriorating ; but it 
represents an equally undesirable extreme. Be- 
tween the two there lies the mean of true agra- 
rian self-realization. 

Education for the farmer must not lead him 
away from the farm, but teach him to bring the 
best from the outside world into farm life. Perhaps 
then we may hold our population generation after 
generation on the ancestral acres, and produce 
that solidity of race, that richness of association 
and legend which make for the beauty of some 
European countries and give the life of the peo- 
ple that perspective which Hawthorne has said 
is necessary to the production of a national liter- 
ature, 



VII 

TRADE EDUCATION AND ORGANIZED LABOR 

Notwithstanding reports to the contrary, or- 
ganized labor favors trade education. At the 
Washington Conference of Labor Leaders, it was 
resolved that industrial training, beginning in the 
higher grammar grades, should become a part of 
the public school system, and that school atten- 
dance up to the age of sixteen years should be 
made compulsory. The meeting of the Federation 
of Labor at Toronto reinforced the Washington 
resolution. It may be objected that the Federa- 
tion is more conservative than the average trade 
union, and hence, though officially labor's organ, 
not really representative of union sentiment. The 
precise weight of this objection can be measured 
by the results of a canvass of New York State 
unions. Out of twenty-four hundred and fifty or- 
ganizations, fifteen hundred favored preparatory 
trade schools for children from fourteen to sixteen; 
and twelve hundred and thirty-two of these also 
favored special trade schools for boys from sixteen 
to eighteen years of age. 

91 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

Nevertheless we often hear that trade unions 
oppose any extension of apprenticeship and are 
much more hostile to free trade education. That 
they have sometimes looked with disfavor upon 
potential competitors, in the fear that they will 
depress the union wage, is undoubtedly true ; and 
certain labor organizations have adopted a medie- 
val policy of limited apprenticeship recalling that 
which formerly undermined the usefulness of 
guilds. The wronged person is rarely wise in his 
first efforts at redress. This restriction upon ap- 
prenticeship is not, however, nearly so important 
or so sweeping as is popularly supposed. Ralph 
Albertson, of Filene's department store, Boston, 
states that no trade union restricts the number 
of apprentices to less than seven per cent of the 
adult workers and that twenty per cent is the 
usual union regulation ; whereas the actual num- 
bers employed in the best trades still left for ap- 
prentices are: 5.86 per cent in machine trades, 5.70 
per cent in plumbing, and 1.3 per cent in the build- 
ing trades. While the danger of overproduction is 
as real in the labor market as in that of manufac- 
ture, experience has taught that in both it is subj ect 
to rational control, and the antagonism to more 
thorough methods of apprenticeship comes from 
a decreasing number of unintelligent laborers 

92 



TRADE EDUCATION AND LABOR 

whose sense of grievance is real and poignant, but 
whose rudimentary vision of cause and effect is 
still blinded by resentment. 

From a Middle Western labor council comes a 
liberal statement upon this most mooted point in 
all union discussions of industrial education. Sup- 
plemental trade schools "have proved a great 
benefit to apprentices who may, by the limits of 
the shop they are working in, or from other causes, 
be denied the advantage of getting into close con- 
tact with all the branches of their work ; and as 
a preliminary training they would give the pro- 
spective mechanic such a grounding in his elemen- 
tary work that it would seem advisable to allow all 
or part of the time spent in the school to count 
on his apprenticeship term." 

The process by which this decision was reached 
reveals the real attitude of the average union man. 
Believing that union labor has a valuable contri- 
bution to offer the projector of a program for in- 
dustrial training, and hoping to create a new block 
of active public opinion in favor of such training 
in Kansas City, the author sent questionnaires to 
every trade union in the city and asked the Indus- 
trial Council to take a definite stand upon the 
matter. The first response from many of the 
locals was a suspicious negation due to ignorance. 

93 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

Letters arguing /r^ and con poured into the au- 
thor's mail — the hottest negatives often furnish- 
ing factual evidence in favor of trade schooling. 
Discussion in the Industrial Council v^ras warm 
and marked, not by opposition to vocational train- 
ing, but by fear of " some nigger in the wood pile." 
Finally the Council appointed a committee to 
study the subject in detail and report its progress 
at successive meetings. The result of this study 
is indicated above, and probably represents the 
attitude not merely of labor leaders, but of 
unionists who have given the subject thoughtful 
consideration. The committee further recom- 
mended that the Industrial Council urge the es- 
tablishment of part-time trade schools, " provided 
the trade instructors were chosen from the best 
men now at work in industry and provided the 
Council were given some share in shaping the 
general policy of the schools." The original hesi- 
tancy of the unions is thus seen to have been com- 
mendable fear of indorsing an ill-defined program, 
a fear that vanished before a clear-cut plan with 
measurable consequences. 

Great difficulties undoubtedly present them 
selves in grounding vocational schools. The train- 
ing must fit the needs of the region or it will 
merely graduate candidates for unemployment. 

94 



TRADE EDUCATION AND LABOR 

Suppose the industry of a region changes. Can 
the school follow quickly enough ? Suppose new 
methods of manufacture are introduced. Can the 
school afford to scrap at once its out-of-date but 
expensive machinery as a factory would do and 
thus keep pace with business development ? How 
to divide pupils among the different branches ; 
how to prevent overcrowding with its subsequent 
oversupply of pupils from popular classes ; how 
to guard against the subtle temptation to over- 
emphasis offered to the principal by iron and wood 
industries which lend themselves well to class- 
room work ; how, in short, to articulate the school 
and the industry so closely that no superfluous 
worker will be produced — these are all questions 
indicative of grave dangers, dangers which make 
the labor union justly oppose, not the trade school 
ideal, but certain types of trade school which in- 
volve them. This is the reason why French work- 
ingmen's organizations have shown real hostility 
to vocational schools whose enrollment is indepen- 
dent of the need for new workers in industry. This 
is also the reason why our own labor unions look 
askance at really effective trade courses which 
rotate apprentices weekly between school and 
factory. Such an arrangement as the Fitchburg, 
Massachusetts plan, with its alternate weeks of 

95 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

classroom study and actual wage-earning, means 
at bottom that twice as many workers are being 
trained as can be ultimately utilized. Against 
such playing into the hands of the employer, labor 
naturally protests. 

But over against these dangers stands the fact 
that it is not skilled but unskilled labor which 
menaces the union wage. ** We have too many un- 
trained boys already in our trade," writes many 
a union secretary. Though it be true that many 
industries must have unskilled helpers, we need 
not acquiesce, nor will the union man, awake to 
the true interest of his class, acquiesce in the plea 
that because there is a certain amount of un- 
skilled work to be done, a whole section of human- 
ity must forever be kept ignorant in order to per- 
form it. Such inferior positions may well be held 
temporarily by beginners in industry who, later, 
will pass to higher tasks and make room at the 
bottom of the ladder for new aspirants. Further- 
more, as far as the eye of the present can reach, 
men will always be unequally able to profit by in- 
struction and the less apt must content them- 
selves with comparatively unskilled work. The 
trade school gives every man a chance to make 
the most of himself, but does not, cannot war- 
rant that the " mosts " will be alike. 

96 



TRADE EDUCATION AND LABOR 

Another trouble, which is sure to arise in the 
course of effective trade school management, is 
that unions oppose the sale of school products. 
The words "institution-made goods" are familiar 
to all who have followed the course of prison re- 
form and have noted the untimely check which, 
because of an unlucky complication of issues,^ 
progressive methods in penitentiaries have often 
met at the hands of manufacturers and unionists 
alike. That the goods are made in an institution 
is not the union objection, but that they some- 
times sell at a price which cannot cover a living 
wage for independent workmen in competing 
factories. When a fall in market prices and subse- 
quent reduction in wages seems imminent, pri- 
son goods are compelled by law to retire from 
the field, and many criminals fall idle in confine- 
ment or are occupied at trades which can be 
of little service to them after discharge. Al- 
though the temptation partly to recoup the 
public treasury for an outlay quite independent 
of sales is easy to understand, there is no reason 
why prison goods should be marketed so far be- 
low the real cost of production ; and an enlight- 
ened opinion will repair this blundering action 

^ Such as the related but entirely separate question of leas- 
ing convict labor to private contractors. 

97 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

and attack the real crux of the matter, regulation 
of prices. The question of school-made goods is 
susceptible of the same sort of regulation. It is 
obviously undesirable for a school to become a 
money-making institution ; speed and economy 
would soon usurp the place of careful education. 
But there is no reason why the prices of school- 
made goods should not follow the market, since 
no private profit impels to underselling the legi- 
timate producer. 

It was not, however, because there were no 
well-grounded arguments against it that the 
American Federation of Labor declared in favor 
of public vocational instruction. These hard> 
handed men recognized that labor would benefit 
thereby, not only in myriad indirect reactions 
upon the laboring man and his living conditions, 
but directly in a higher wage. That competence 
is better paid than incompetence is self-evident, 
and the proof which, in economics, even an axiom 
seems to require is furnished by comparison of 
the wages of trade school graduates and ordinary 
apprentices. The Massachusetts Commission on 
Industrial and Technical Training publish the fol- 
lowing table based upon a study of two thousand 
wage-earners in Massachusetts : — 



98 



TRADE EDUCATION AND LABOR 



Age 


Wages per week of 


Wages per week of 


mere apprentice 


Trade School Graduate 


H 


$ 4.00 




IS 


4-50 




i6 


5.00 




17 


6.00 


— 


18 


7.00 


$10.00 


19 


8.50 


11-75 


20 


9-50 


15.00 


21 


9-50 


16.00 


22 


11.50 


20.00 


23 


11-75 


21.00 


24 


12.00 


23.00 


25 


12.75 


31.00 



The depressing effect on wages in industry of 
the low rates due to overcrowding in non-indus- 
trial lines, particularly clerical, would be in some 
measure counteracted by attracting into trade 
those very competitors before whom some short- 
sighted union men tremble, but who might per- 
form the additional service of superseding the 
cheaper labor of the immigrants who menace 
American standards in many vocations and pre- 
sent a problem with which unions cope valiantly 
but ineffectually. 

A less obvious feature of the effect on wages 
of better trade instruction is its bearing on inter- 

99 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

national competition. Unless the American la- 
borer wishes to be superseded on his own soil by 
the output of some clever toiler across the sea, 
he must be cleverer than his distant rival. But 
until he has as good a training as is given to 
workmen abroad, he will be no more certain of 
his job than if that foreigner were standing at his 
elbow asking for it. 

If the future of labor is to lie in the hands of 
labor, then labor must be wise. When the work- 
ing man can afford to remain longer in school, he 
will learn to use his head as well as his hands, 
and the union needs heads fully as much as hands. 
At present, half its strength goes to self-educa- 
tion. To raise the standard of living of its mem- 
bers, to teach workers the value of their labor, to 
open their eyes to what constitutes decent condi- 
tions of work and pay, to arouse them to the 
need for organization, and to drill them in effect- 
ive methods of cooperation are the prime tasks 
which confront the labor union, and especially 
the labor union in immigrant neighborhoods. The 
real champion of Americanism is the American 
laborer ; and in fortifying American standards, 
the struggle of the union will find its strongest 
support in the trade school. 

Not only higher standards, but the thought 

100 



TRADE EDUCATION AND LABOR 

power which breeds sane and rational methods 
of accomplishing them, will be the property of a 
better educated working public. With training in 
history and civics and hygiene comes a widening 
of outlook which will elevate union effort from 
the level of self-seeking to that of civic enter- 
prise. Let the rank and file come into the organ- 
ization equipped, not only with the information 
necessary to secure their own advancement, but 
with some knowledge of the place of that ad- 
vancement in the social and industrial whole, 
and the union will prove an invincible force 
both for workingmen's betterment and for public 
welfare. 



VIII 

TRADE EDUCATION AND SOCIALISM 

Socialism is a philosophy of intelligence. 

It is not a leveling down of society. It is not 
absolute communism. It is not a scheme of spo- 
liation devised by the "have nots" to enrich them- 
selves at the expense of the " haves." It is not 
a system of governmental paternalism and indi- 
vidual inertia. Its ideal is not drab uniformity. 

Benjamin Franklin once said of a plan, whose 
adoption he had unsuccessfully defended, that 
the extreme diversity and contradictorinessof the 
arguments urged against it proved to him the 
soundness of his proposition. The socialist might 
lay the same flattering unction to his soul, as at- 
tacks against his theory of life are so opposite in 
nature as to refute each other. This is due to a 
general misconception of what his theory is. 

Some one has jestingly remarked that every 
thinking man is a socialist, whether he knows it 
or not. In a measure this is true, for every think- 
ing man believes in equal opportunity for all : 
not in equality — but in opportunity to make the 
most of those diverse, unequal abilities latent 

1 02 



TRADE EDUCATION AND SOCIALISM 

within us. What philosophy calls self-realization 
is the socialist's ideal. Nothing could be more 
inimical to self-realization than the perfect uni- 
formity of communism or the absolute license of 
nihilism. Socialism would proceed by another 
road. Man in society must at the same time be 
free to grow up to his individual limits. 

That he is not at present free to do so is the 
socialist's contention. Private ownership of cap- 
ital in land and in the instruments of production 
has given certain individuals power to determine 
the living conditions of great masses of people ; 
and the competitive organization of business has 
forced them into using this power to grind down 
the working public to a level where real living is 
impossible. Socialism would transfer from pri- 
vate hands to the general public the ownership 
of such capital. This, according to John Spargo,^ 
does not mean entire abolition of property lines. 
Only as private property gives control over hu- 
man life, or reaps social values, is it a menace. 
Monopolies belong to the public : small indepen- 
dent industries might well be left to private initia- 
tive subject to governmental regulation. 

Some persons, indeed some socialists, see in 

^ John Spargo, exponent of American socialism, in an ad- 
dress at Vassar College, 1907. 

103 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

socialism a purely proletarian movement. This is 
a narrow view. Socialism is not a class philosophy, 
but a universal philosophy. Matthew Arnold, 
the apostle of culture, pleads that our inequal- 
ity " materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our 
middle class, and brutalizes our lower class," and 
it is for the sake of all humanity that the socialist 
desires the abolition of private profit which, he 
maintains, robs master and servant alike. Society 
will be far richer when the lives now blighted by 
adverse economic environment reach full fruition 
of their powers. 

With the case for or against socialism we are 
not here and now concerned, but the bearing of 
this most significant of contemporary propaganda 
upon the question of industrial education cannot 
be ignored. We are tending toward a more and 
more socialistic form of society. The fact that the 
party polls every year a larger and larger vote is 
the most negligible proof that this is true. So- 
cialism's gains have come in the main through 
agents without the ranks. The concentration of 
capital we have witnessed in the United States 
during the last quarter of a century has paved 
the way to a socialization of commerce and indus- 
try which is already taking place. Governmental 
supervision is a pseudo-ownership, examples of 

104 



TRADE EDUCATION AND SOCIALISM 

which confront us on every hand. Once the re- 
sponsibility of the state in this regard is estab- 
lished, real ownership will follow where regulation 
proves inadequate. Natural resources are thus 
more and more appropriated by the state. Muni- 
cipalites are managing their public utilities. 
Plank after plank in the socialistic program has 
found its way into German, English, and Ameri- 
can legislation in the shape of extended suffrage, 
initiative and referendum, employer's liability 
laws, old age pensions, accident and sick insur- 
ance. Even in our homes we feel the socialization 
of living. Not only are we dependent upon the 
outer world for our supplies, but milk inspectors, 
pure food laws, building regulations, and health 
boards attest social responsibility for individual 
welfare. 

All this means an increasingly complicated 
system of government requiring greater efficiency 
on the part of officials, and greater and greater 
civic spirit and intelligence in the citizens who 
elect and censor them. How well is a republic, 
where less than one fourth of the voters ever pass 
beyond the fifth or sixth grade in grammar school, 
prepared to solve these vast and delicate gov- 
ernmental problems } The socialistic state re- 
quires high-grade citizenship. It requires a think- 

105 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

ing and an acting public ; and especially does it 
demand that the public should think and act along 
the lines in which vocational schools should train 
their pupils. 

The crux of socialism is of course economic. 
The socialist must understand industry in order to 
realize his ideal without injustice : not merely that 
particular little industrial pigeonhole in which 
he finds his daily bread, but the whole trade sit- 
uation. Specialization has multiplied class antag- 
onisms, and just so long as we have an unintelli- 
gent working population whose vision is bounded 
by the special process at which they toil, who do 
not understand the work and function of all fac- 
tors of production and distribution, so long shall 
we have irrational demands from labor and irra- 
tional outbreaks ; so long shall we have an ever- 
growing mass of workers given over to an abor- 
tive, half-baked socialism, which comes to little 
more than nihilism, violence and damaging of 
property in the end. When, however, as Mr. 
Spargo points out, discontented persons are wise 
and educated enough to see their position in its 
historical perspective, there is no class hatred for 
the capitalist on the part of the worker. Then he 
judges institutions and not men ; and would in- 
troduce his reforms through legislation fair to 

1 06 



TRADE EDUCATION AND SOCIALISM 

laborer and capitalist alike. Labor has a voting 
majority, and the only safe thing for capital is to 
educate labor broadly and thoroughly. 

It is not alone in realizing the socialistic ideal 
that intelligent citizenship is imperative. If labor 
is to own capital and conduct industry, it will be 
necessary that the workers understand the whole 
process of manufacture and marketing. Can the 
academic high school or even industry itself teach 
them this .'* And when government officials are 
managing directors of commercial enterprises, the 
stockholding voter must keep a watchful and 
seeing eye upon the administration of the pub- 
lic's business. ''There is no such thing as an 
automatic democracy : the price of liberty will 
always be eternal vigilance." ^ 

If we ever have a socialistic state, progress 
will no longer be stimulated by desire for private 
gain. In place of love of profit must come love of 
perfection and the intelligence which sees beyond 
personal concern to the general good. Can six 
years in grammar school inculcate this ? 

The socialists themselves are the first to rec- 
ognize that the corner stone in their edifice is 
education. " Anything which raises the standard 
of life, morality, and mentality of the workers, 

* Spargo: Socialism. 
10/ 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

makes them increasingly fit to assume complete 
controloverindustry," says Robert Hunter.^ That 
vocational training is the surest means to this 
end was the thought of the Radical Republican 
and Socialist Congress at Dijon when it declared 
in favor of obligatory industrial education. 

1 Robert Hunter, Socialists at Work, 



IX 

FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

It is not enough to believe in the efficacy of trade 
education. Faith may suffice for religion, that 
glorious realm of the still unrealized ideal ; but in 
practical affairs, we demand sight, proof, fact. 
Therefore the advocate of industrial training 
turns to actual working examples, namely, the 
trade schools of Europe, for his best argument 
as to its feasibility. Moreover, at this moment, 
when American interest in industrial education 
far outruns the definite formulation of our con- 
cept as to what such training should comprise 
and a rosy glow of enthusiasm lights up clouds 
of theory, renewed study of the well-tried Euro- 
pean systems is a propos. France and Germany 
are emerging from the educational renaissance 
at whose beginning we find ourselves. Lack of 
perspective and of thorough investigation pre- 
vents us from judging rightly the effectiveness 
of our first experiments in trade instruction. But 
the oversea school presents no such difficulty. 
There we read plainly the failure of methods on 

109 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

trial in our own country. There we see large- 
scale experimentation with appreciable results, and 
gain a criterion for testing the worth of our own 
gropings. There we learn what painstaking study 
of the business world must precede the drafting 
of a successful program. 

Trade schools for beginners may undertake to 
supplant or to supplement apprenticeship. Ger- 
man schools belong as a rule to the second, 
French, to the first, class. Among German schools 
there are two types: the Berlin continuation 
school, which supplements apprenticeship by gen- 
eral intelligence courses and relies upon the child's 
labor in his master's shop to give him trade prac- 
tice ; and the Munich institution, which includes 
practical work in the curriculum. 

These three forms of the industrial school are 
the product of equally distinct ideals. That of the 
French educator is a skilled artisan ; Berlin has 
in view a well-informed worker; while Munich 
strives to produce a useful man. 

/. Paris 

At thirteen, the Parisian child of poor parents, 
having mastered the three R's and got a smatter- 
ing of French history, completes his required 
schooling. A few years ago only two courses then 

no 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

opened before him : to go at once to work or to 
continue a purely academic education through 
the public high school and fit himself for com- 
merce or clerical positions. But this was at last 
found unsatisfactory. The majority of French 
children, as is true of children in any other land, 
are destined for industry. The schools not only 
failed to train them for this, but actually rendered 
them unwilling to do manual work for a living. 
Despising their only means of subsistence, hun- 
dreds of girls went on the streets to avoid " de- 
grading drudgery," ^ and thousands of boys found 
themselves unable to obtain places in the al- 
ready overcrowded clerical and professional field. 
Meanwhile there developed in industry a crisis 
unparalleled in the history of other countries 
and threatening to destroy the century-long 
French preeminence in hand industries. Appren- 
ticeship had become a dead letter and speciali- 
zation had so degraded the quality of labor that 
employers were confronted by an absolute lack 
of skilled workers. Meanwhile the colleges were 
turning out theorists and overseers, who found 
themselves in the anomalous position of hav- 
ing no one to oversee. On the other hand, 

1 See Prostitution des Enfants, Eugene Prevost, Avocat k 
la Cour d'Appel, Paris. 1909. 

Ill 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

unemployment assumed the proportions of a 
Problem. 

In the face of German competition, public in- 
terest rose to fever heat and so remains to the 
present day. All over France trade schools have 
been established which aim to meet the desire 
for popular education^ and to replace the old- 
time apprenticeship as a preparation for business. 
These have proved utterly inadequate in number 
to supply the demand for skilled workers. The 
situation is aggravated by two imperfections in 
the child labor laws, which have, on the one 
hand, allowed many children to work before they 
have acquired the rudiments of an education ; 
and, on the other, forced them, as is indeed the 
case in our own country, into the lowest of un- 
skilled labor which offers no prospect of advance- 
ment and substantially unfits the little worker 
for other and better paid positions. 

Alarmist literature and agitated discussion of 
the subject abound, discussion originating with 
educators, employers, and social students alike. 
A special League for the Encouragement of 
Apprenticeship has been formed. The only ele- 
ment, in fact, which is not yet fully aroused to 
the necessity for trade instruction is organized 
labor ; and it is safe to say that the unions do not 

112 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

object to trade schools per se, but fear that the 
capitalists will use them to train cheap labor to 
complete with union workers.^ 

Meanwhile a fire of criticism, favorable and 
adverse, is directed toward the elementary 
schools now in existence. It is with this voca- 
tional school for the plain man, with the actual 
classroom experience of its pupils and the proved 
successes and failures of this experience as a pre- 
paration for trade life, that the present chapter 
is concerned. Paris boasts fourteen such institu- 
tions ^ which children may enter upon completion 
of the grammar grades, each having for its object 
the training, not of overseers, but of ordinary 
workmen. 

In the land which, next to Italy, has made art 
most nearly conterminous with life and which 
has more than once in philosophy and govern- 

1 In Paris 124 out of 229 trade unions voted in favor of 
trade school work. 

2 For boys : courses in the metal trades, pattern -making, 
decorative art, industrial design, pottery, sculpture, cabinet- 
making, surveying, mechanics, electricity, and the book in- 
dustries. 

For girls : trade and domestic science work, including cut- 
ting, sewing, lingerie, tailoring, embroidery, pressing, corsets, 
vests, artificial flowers, industrial design, pottery, fine art, book- 
making, typewriting, stenography, laundry work, general house- 
work and cooking. 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

ment pushed symmetry to the breaking point, 
one finds, naturally enough, the two salient 
features of the schools to be emphasis upon ar- 
tistic values and close correlation of all parts of 
the curriculum. Both these features are particu- 
larly marked in the Ecole Estiemie, a boys* school 
devoted to all trades connected with book- 
making. 

A glance at the course of study brings home 
the complexity of the business world which the 
pupils enter upon graduation. The subject of 
typography comprises four distinct trades : type- 
setting, type-founding, printing, and stereotyp- 
ing. Lithography is split into lithography proper, 
lithographic script, stone engraving, and litho- 
graphic printing. Engraving covers wood engrav- 
ing, engraving in relief, copper plate, and photo- 
engraving, and printing from copper plate ; while 
binding is divided into binding and gilding. Four 
years of eleven months each are required to gain 
a certificate of apprenticeship in any of these 
trades. Sunday is the only holiday and the school 
holds from 8.30 in the morning till 6 at night. 

The mornings are devoted to theoretical work : 
the afternoons, to practical instruction, except 
for a slight preponderance of practice in the last 
years. Each trade has its own shop for practical 

114 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

work in charge of special instructors, and during 
the first four months of the term, the new pupils 
attend in rotation all the workshops in the school 
and thus make choice of a profession. 

In spite of the complexity of the problem, the 
course of study is a coherent unit. The morning 
lessons in theory (comprising French, general 
history, geography, history of art and of the book 
industry, mathematics, physics, chemistry, zool- 
ogy, drawing, modeling, writing, and original 
design) are the same for all pupils in the first 
two years. In the third and fourth years, pupils 
are grouped in three sections which handle sub- 
jects bearing most directly upon the individual 
trades. In the case of the lithographers, en- 
gravers, and gilders, designing predominates ; 
with the typesetters, it is French, and general 
information ; while the printers and founders 
study in more detail physics, chemistry, and 
mechanics. This orientation of theory towards 
practice does not begin in the third year, how- 
ever. With the opening of the first year, the 
pupil finds that what he learns in one course is 
not so much isolated knowledge, to be saved up 
till that class and its quizzes come round again, 
but something he will take up and use when the 
bell has tapped and his next period begins. 

115 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

The principles of plane geometry as studied in 
the first year are applied, in the courses for geo- 
metrical design, to the composition of vignettes, 
margins, and covers. Flowers, treated scientifi- 
cally in botany under one instructor, are drawn 
and modeled from nature in other classes ; form 
the subjects for the conventionalized tail-pieces, 
illuminations and fancy initials which the stu- 
dents design in the third and fourth years under 
a still different teacher ; and are then used as 
working plans in shop practice. The different 
styles discussed in lectures on the history of art 
are actually copied in drawing-class ; are modern- 
ized and adapted to the needs and materials of 
particular trades as original designs ; and then 
put to use in the various ateliers. Where the 
designs for shopwork are not made in the draw- 
ing-class, they are still made by the pupil him- 
self and are applications of the principles there 
laid down. Although they also set up after mod- 
els, typesetters often design their "ad's" and 
pages ; gilders, their stamps ; and type-founders, 
their fancy type ; while engravers execute their 
own drawings. Physics and chemistry are not 
only taught parallel with botany and zoology, 
where they are of constant use in explaining the 
phenomena of growth and decay, but are made to 

ii6 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

apply to the concrete problems of photography, 
engraving, etching, founding, and machine opera- 
tion. History and geography are connected in 
like manner. History and the history of art are 
made interdependent. The history of the book 
industry draws from both sources. Classes in 
French utilize material from every other depart- 
ment for composition subjects, for dictation, and 
for illustration of grammatical rules. In short, 
what is learned in the theoretical courses under 
one teacher is applied in an original design under 
another, and in the afternoon, put into practice 
in the workshops. The constant effort is to de- 
velop originality and creative power in each 
pupil, and, because the whole course hangs to- 
gether, he is helped to constructive thinking 
which will make connections for itself. The 
children see where their work is tending and of 
what practical use it will be to them. They are 
therefore interested and intelligent. Because 
everything they turn out in the shops represents 
their cumulative effort, they take that pride in 
the finish and artistic quality of their product 
which has hitherto given to French hand indus- 
tries world-wide supremacy. 

A further correlation takes place between the 
practical work in separate trades. The printers 

117 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

use in their presses what the compositors have 
set up with type from the founding class. This 
is illustrated by the engravers with cuts used in 
the courses for impression taking. Perhaps the 
printed book or pamphlet then goes to the bind- 
ing-rooms and is at last finished and gilded by 
pupils in still another trade. Thus, not only does 
each pupil feel that his work has a definite prac- 
tical outcome, but a whole class may work to- 
gether to produce that which can be put to direct 
use somewhere else, and ultimately serve to 
arouse esprit de corps in the entire school body. 

Examination of the work of the different de- 
partments shows how closely consideration for 
artistic values is woven into every portion of the 
individual courses. Each practice class spends a 
large portion of its time in considering the 
special art problems of its trade. The pupil must 
learn to reproduce the ordinary objects of his 
drawing-class with the tools of his calling : the 
graver's awl, the lithographer's pencil, the gilder's 
stamp. He must apply here, through a new me- 
dium, the principles of beauty he has elsewhere 
evolved, and is brought to see that a catalogue, 
a poster, an advertisement, is governed by the 
same laws as the painter's masterpiece. 

In the Ecolc Boiille are taught the marvelously 

ii8 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

many trades involved in the making of a single 
piece of furniture, beginning with the designing 
and following through the making of the frame, 
the molding in plaster of the prospective orna- 
ment, the actual carving of the wood after the 
plaster model, the inlay, and the iron, brass, and 
nickel work, down to the polishing and varnish- 
ing. Here, too, the emphasis is upon the artistic 
and creative sides of production. Mr. Brizon 
states the purpose of the school to be " to train 
workers able to conserve the traditions of taste 
and the superiority of the peculiarly Parisian in- 
dustry of artistic furniture." To conserve the tra- 
ditions of the glorious past in French furniture, 
the school has a special exhibit room illustrating 
various styles famous in the history of the indus- 
try. This set of replicas, made in the school, is 
supplemented by a collection of casts representing 
types of ornamentation. In speaking of the equip- 
ment of any Parisian school, one must always 
bear in mind the great museums of the Louvre 
and of Cluny, which are arranged to be patently 
educative and which are used much more exten- 
sively for school purposes than any remotely 
comparable American collections. All these fac- 
tors skillfully employed by the teacher of art 
and industrial history, serve to steep the pupil, 

119 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

not only in ideas, but in the fact and spirit of his 
trade as an artistic development. The last year 
of the course is devoted to modern styles in fur- 
niture-making, and the pupils are encouraged to 
create for themselves, on simple lines, designs 
which sustain the standards and modernize the 
spirit of the great artists with whose work they 
have become familiar. 

This effort on the part of the instructors in 
art fits compactly into the scheme of the practice 
work, in every branch of which the pupils execute 
after approved models for the first two years and 
design for themselves during the last. This plan 
is intended to combat the disintegrating tenden- 
cies in modern'f urniture-making — slavish imita- 
tion of old models and flashy novelty in orna- 
mentation. It is hoped that by a study of the 
history and theory of former styles, the pupils 
will be led to imitate, not the patterns, but the 
spirit and the methods of the old masters ; and, 
in the same way that Louis XIV's great cabinet- 
maker, Boulle, developed a style appropriate to 
the civilization in which he lived, themselves 
come to understand what is suited to the life of 
the modern household. 

The course in wood carving illustrates the 
general plan of treating art in connection with 

120 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

practice. The elementary exercises are naturally 
directed toward the mastery of tools and mate- 
rials. When a tolerable degree of skill is acquired, 
the pupil begins to design for himself. Suppose 
a chair is given for decoration. He applies what 
he has learned in drawing to make a sketch for 
the proposed ornamentation of a leg. This he 
must model in clay to get a good idea of the form 
and test the applicability of his flat design to 
sculptured relief. He then makes a plaster cast 
of his corrected model and from this pattern ex- 
ecutes his carving. More advanced students carve 
from a sketch without plaster pattern, but not 
until their sense of form and body is as well de- 
veloped as that of outline. 

Not only is every course in every Parisian school 
colored by regard for artistic values,^ but the aim 
is also to combat specialization in its narrowest 
sense. The hours devoted to practical instruction 
are not exclusively occupied by bench work, but 
comprise the technical instruction necessary to a 
perfect understanding of the work in hand in its 
relation to the trade as a whole. The effort is also 
toward varied practice. The copper-plate printer in 
the Acole Estienne^ for example, is given practice 

1 There are also successful schools for both boys and girls 
which teach industrial design as a special trade. 

121 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

on job work as well as Mitions de Itixe^ on visiting- 
cards and bills, on illustrations and maps, whereas, 
were he serving an apprenticeship in a shop, he 
would learn only the specialty of that shop. 
Courses for artificial flower-makers teach, like- 
wise, all sorts of flowers, on the branch, after na- 
ture, and for the modes. The student of jewelry 
specializes at either the hand or machine process, 
but becomes familiar with both methods, as well 
as with the manufacture of the stamps used. 
General trade intelligence and not particular 
manual skill is the end in view ; yet the proper 
basis for manual dexterity is given in the thor- 
ough understanding of all processes and in the 
constant use of real machines and real trade 
materials. 

Teaching a complementary trade not closely 
allied to one's specialty is a feature peculiar to 
the Ecole Boulle. This is the same for all pupils 
— hammered brass and copper. The children 
spend an hour a week for three years at this, 
and while they do not attain great skill, they are 
capable of turning what they learn to practical 
use in case work fails them at any time in their 
trade. This brass and copper practice was chosen 
both on account of the comparative ease with 
which some degree of proficiency can be acquired 

122 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

and because the recent revival of interest in hand- 
hammered goods gives certainty of finding odd 
jobs. 

As attendance upon trade schools is not com- 
pulsory in France, sweeping inferences as to re- 
sults are dangerous. Some phenomena are, how- 
ever, obviously attendant upon the foundation of 
trade schools. The school enrollment has risen 
greatly ; and the percentage of daily attendance 
and the ratio of graduation to first year enroll- 
ment is higher for vocational than for academic 
schools. M. Brizon quotes in his Appre7iticeship: 
Yesterday — Today — To-morrow ^ the opinions 
of employers and educators that the ultimate 
wage-earning capacity of the trade school grad- 
uate is considerably above that of the average ap- 
prentice. A majority of the Parisian manufac- 
turers* associations have unanimously expressed 
themselves as favoring public industrial educa- 
tion, but their commendation of the ideal is tinged 
with an ever-recurring criticism of present trade 
school methods The furniture workers maintain 
that, although the trade school graduate is less 
adroit at first, because of his general education he 
is better later on than an apprentice. The heavy- 
iron workers find that, though in the end he shows 
himself more intelligent, the trade school youth 

123 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

is at first wasteful and hence paid less than an 
apprentice who has been in industry while his 
colleague was at school. Dressmakers prefer 
trade school graduates because they produce at 
once ; jewelers, because they are all-round work- 
men. But printers, photographers, and engravers 
prefer apprentices who take prof essio7ial courses in 
cottnection with trade worky because they are 
swifter. "Trade graduates have had too little 
practical work." The Council of Makers of In- 
struments of Precision sum up the problem in 
saying that if graduates of trade schools are will- 
ing to begin at the bottom and put themselves 
au courant with the trade, they become better 
workers than those who have not had school 
training ; but that often they are not wilHng to 
do this and are then too theoretical. 

In short, there is a gap between the French 
trade school and business conditions which the 
trade graduate must bridge for himself ; and the 
spirit of the school often unfits pupils for bridg- 
ing it. In spite of the studied symmetry of the 
course ; in spite of the cultural and intellectual 
value of the three or four years spent in the 
classroom ; in spite of the general trade intelli- 
gence the pupil has gained ; — in spite of all 
these undeniable assets, he enters industry 

124 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

handicapped. He is unaccustomed to conditions 
of work in a shop where competition forces 
economy of time and material. He is exquisitely 
careful in the execution of his tasks, but is 
neither speedy nor dexterous, and these latter 
failings account for the dissatisfaction of so 
many an employer with trade school pupils. 

One solution of this difficulty is offered by the 
school for girls in Fondary Street, which teaches 
the distinctly feminine occupations of sewing, 
tailoring, millinery, and laundry work. The aca- 
demic side of this and similar institutions is 
neither so varied nor so thorough as in the boys' 
schools, because girls are not expected to make 
such serious use of it and do not often engage in 
professions demanding high-grade intelligence. 
But an especial effort is here made to keep in 
touch with actual trade conditions by having the 
senior pupils fill orders for the clients of their 
several departments. This insures variety in work 
and gives interest in saving time and material 
and in the quality of the output. The difference 
between the courses which follow a clientele and 
those in which the children work on models and 
with sham materials is striking. Nowhere in the 
former is that slackness and waste of material 
evident which marked each course of the latter 

125 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

type visited. The school in Fondary Street has 
the aspect of a select shop. As in all Parisian 
schools which sell their products, prices are 
everywhere a little higher than those on the 
regular market, since they are fixed to cover 
the increased cost of production in a schoolroom 
where work is slow and the factory foremen are 
replaced by high-priced teachers. 

The League for the Encouragement of Ap- 
prentices proposes another remedy for the all 
too evident cleavage between schooling and prac- 
tice : i. e., part-time day schools compulsory for 
apprentices in industry and in charge of men 
with extensive trade experience. In other words, 
this League, which has studied more thoroughly 
than any other agency the business and educa- 
tional aspects of the French situation, looks to 
Germany for the solution of its problems. 

//. Berlin 

While trade schools in France have been the 
slow response to a crying need, the German sys- 
tem of education is more truly the result of fore- 
sight. To understand any German institution, 
we must remember that for what many another 
nation owes to haphazard growth through the 
ages, the Teutonic empire must thank the sys- 

126 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

tematic plans of her rulers, who^ within a cen- 
tury and by a concerted scheme of action, have 
developed Germany from a group of negligible 
petty kingdoms to one of the foremost virorld 
powers. In this development, the industrial and 
commercial policy of the government has had, if 
not the title role, at least that of principal sup- 
port. Political integrity was not enough. Ger- 
many must be both industrially self-sufficient 
and necessary to the consuming world at large. 
As every young German is trained to defend his 
country in time of war, so is he also trained to 
defend her in the markets of the world in times 
of peace. That this program has been success- 
ful is attested by the rapid commercial advance 
of this newest of nations. Not only does Ger- 
many produce an amazing proportion of what 
it uses, but German goods have captured the 
French market and are invading even England 
and the United States. We buy hundreds of 
articles whose label, " Made in Germany," may 
be a lie about the place of manufacture, but is 
no uncertain hint as to where they should have 
been made to secure first quality. In the words 
of a French student, — and the French, oddly 
enough, are Germany's most appreciative critics, 
— " Germans lack initiative and inventiveness, 

127 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

but these things are trained little by little into 
the people by a system of education ever on the 
alert to inculcate good methods of work. The 
results which Germany has obtained she owes 
largely to scientific methods." 

Of course a deal of cheap nonsense is talked 
about the prosperity of the Fatherland. Ger- 
many is not yet the modern Eden, or else the 
tide of immigration — that most delicate indus- 
trial barometer — would set away from the 
United States and toward our martial cousins. 
Though she manages to tuck them effectually 
out of sight, Germany still has her poor and sin- 
ning. But the traveler must be impressed by 
the solid aspect of German towns, by their inner 
strength and self-sufficient Germanness, and by 
the absence of that pitiful catering to tourists 
which marks the decadence of Paris. Even the 
tiniest stores have tasteful show windows ar- 
ranged with remarkable sense of color and pro- 
portion. Far more extraordinary than the lovely 
flower displays, which brighten many a grim side 
street with the sunshine of daffodils and mari- 
golds, is the beauty of dairies and butcher shops, 
recalling, by their profusion of herbs, jellies, sau- 
sages, fruit and game, some splendid still life by 
Fyt. 

128 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

One involuntarily asks oneself where that 
dumpy little fellow in the linen apron, who has 
come out to eye his wares critically from the 
curbing, ever caught the knack. He would be 
prompt enough in his answer if the question 
were put to him : " In the continuation school 
for butchers." 

The French system of trade schools may be 
termed optional supplanting of apprenticeship. 
The German is a compulsory supplementing of 
it, and to the continuation schools of Berlin must 
go every boy between the ages of fourteen and 
seventeen, who is at work in commerce or trade.^ 
The six hours a week devoted to schooling are 
usually taken from the working day and the em- 
ployer is made responsible for his apprentice's 
school attendance. Some courses are given on 
Sunday, others at night, but there is a strong 
movement on foot to bring all classes into the 
daytime and, where possible, into the morning 
schedule. 

Since the age qualification is the only require- 
ment (completion of the grammar grades being 
entirely beside the question), the continuation 
schools receive pupils at widely different stages 
of advancement. The boys in each year are there- 

1 It is hoped soon to extend this compulsion to girls as well. 

129 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

fore grouped, according to their preparation, in 
three sections, work for which follows the same 
general plan, with special adaptations as the 
needs suggest, makes up for past deficiencies, 
and carries the pupils forward as far as is com- 
patible with thoroughness in every inch of ground 
covered. A typical continuation school in the 
Moabit district offers six hour per week courses 
for machinists, locksmiths, merchants, crafts- 
men, and unskilled workers such as errand boys. 
Instruction in the five departments is entirely 
separate. There is no practical work in the 
school ; manual skill and knowledge of trade pro- 
cesses the child must pick up under his em- 
ployer. The school continues the work of the 
grammar grades with special application to the 
trade at which the pupil works ; gives general 
historical and technical information about this 
trade ; and familiarizes the pupil with the laws 
governing it and with his own relation to the 
city, state, and nation. To impart general infor- 
mation in such a way that the child will apply it 
to his work and his social relations is, in short, 
the ideal. 

The instruction comprises German, civics, 
technology, mathematics, bookkeeping, and draw- 
ing. The drawing differs with the department. 

130 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

Machinists begin with the principles of mechani- 
cal drawing and pass to copying separate parts 
from machines used in their respective trades. 
These models are chosen for their typical value 
in machine construction as well as for training 
in drawing. Finally entire machines are copied, 
and the apprentice who, in industry, is engaged in 
the manufacture of some infinitesimal part of an 
object, learns the connection of that part with 
the whole. The pupils thus understand without 
explanation specification drawings given them 
in the shop or factory ; and as ability to sketch 
a desired machine is essential in a foreman or 
upper grade practical machinist, this course in 
drawing is the initial step in advancement for 
the cleverer pupils. 

The work connects directly with the course in 
technology, which is really the nucleus of the 
entire curriculum. Here are studied trade ma- 
terials, their origin and uses ; the main operations 
of the trade ; the principles governing them; the 
finished products and their uses; marketing and 
prices. A painter must learn all his implements 
and the special uses of the different kinds of 
brushes and colors. He must understand the 
manufacture and the blending of oils. He can 
tell from what flax-seed oil is made ; can describe 

131 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

the plant and its culture ; knows where it grows 
and the color of its blossom, for he has seen it 
in the school collection, and drawn it for his de- 
signing class ; and can tell other uses of the flax 
plant. He learns the relative cost and value of 
different oils and can explain these facts intelli- 
gibly. In short, everything which enters into a 
trade must be thoroughly understood not only 
in that specific connection, but in all other con- 
nections. As one readily sees, this gives oppor- 
tunity for imparting varied information of a 
popular and scientific kind, and instruction in 
industrial history and geography is here intro- 
duced. The teacher keeps in mind the fact that 
he is not only training labor but educating men, 
and while the trade is the pivot of the course, 
the importance of mental drill and culture is not 
forgotten. 

Mathematics follows upon the class in tech- 
nology and is directly dependent upon it for sub- 
ject-matter. After the class has studied a given 
material, all possible problems which might arise 
any day in connection with it are solved. The 
text-book is thoroughly practical, having been 
prepared by educators and business men in col- 
laboration, and its success is attested by the 
keen interest of even the dullest pupils. Each 

132 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

boy is required to keep an account-book for a 
firm doing business in his line. 

German is presented in the form of business 
correspondence, but all the courses are, in a man- 
ner, training in the proper use of language, as no 
pupil is allowed to respond in less than a com- 
plete, correct sentence. 

The continuation school trains the man at the 
machine. For the ambitious worker who wishes 
to rise in the industrial ranks, there is the higher 
trade school represented by the Berliner Tischler 
Schuley whose purpose is to give cabinetmakers, 
who have already for several years engaged in 
the practice of their trade, an opportunity to 
round out by exercises in joinery their one-sided 
training due to present-day specialization. It is a 
day school with a two year course (open to per- 
sons who have completed a two year apprentice- 
ship), including recitation and practice in artistic 
joinery and in the use of machines, study of 
materials, industrial chemistry, commercial law, 
trade mathematics, and industrial design. All 
the pupils have attended the continuation school 
during their apprenticeship, but wish to supple- 
ment the exclusively theoretical training there 
given by an all-round practice which they cannot 
get in a shop or factory where each employee 

133 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

has a specialty which he follows year after year, 
and where, in all probability, the factory itself 
deals with only one branch of the trade. There 
is absolutely no specialization in the school ; each 
pupil has exercises in all the different kinds of 
joinery, and each pupil makes a whole object, 
thus practicing all the trades taught separately in 
the Ecole Boiille. Coming, as the training does, 
at the end of apprenticeship, it makes for thor- 
oughness and breadth, and exerts an unquestion- 
able influence toward mobility of labor and 
lessened unemployment. 

A similar institute is the Hohere Weber 
Schule, open to women as well as men, and pre- 
senting courses in all trades for the manufacture 
and use of textiles. The normal length of the 
course is three years, but many pupils attend 
merely a trimester to learn some new machine or 
process. The author expressed surprise at seeing 
men and women advanced in years working side 
by side with younger pupils, and was told that 
women thrown on their own resources often come 
here to learn a trade ; and that men, out of em- 
ployment in their own specialty and too old to 
be taken as apprentices in industry, acquire in 
the Weber Schule a new speciality and so con- 
tinue self-supporting. 

134 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

The flexibility of the German, as compared 
with the French system of industrial education, 
is here apparent. There is no rigid term of work 
and no general plan of instruction applied to 
each department and making of the entire school 
a symmetrical organization. On the contrary, the 
theoretical instruction is separate for each branch. 
The division of time between practice and theory 
and the length of the courses vary with the re- 
spective trades. The emphasis everywhere put 
upon drawing, and the cooperation between de- 
partments which carry out and finish each other's 
work, remind one of the French program. But 
the methods and spirit of the art departments 
are diverse. Whether their contrasting atmos- 
phere is due to a corresponding difference in na- 
tional temper is hard to determine. The German 
course is likely to stress at every point trade util- 
ity ; while, in France, one begins in the realm 
of pure art and takes the application to the par- 
ticular industry as an outgrowth of this. 

In comparison with the continuation school 
previously discussed, the pendulum here swings 
almost as far toward practice as it swung there 
toward theory. General branches are taught as 
a running accompaniment to bench work and an 
effort is made to gain speed and dexterity. This 

135 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

is the inevitable result of the presence in the 
classroom of workers experienced in shop 
methods. 

One of the most interesting Berlin experiments 
in industrial education is the so-called practice 
workshop for artistic wrought iron, machine con- 
struction, and manufacture of instruments of pre- 
cision, which admits, during unemployment or 
between jobs, workers who have had several 
years' experience, and teaches them greater skill 
in their specialty, or perhaps more of the trades 
in general from a theoretical or executive stand- 
point than they can learn in a factory. The course 
lasts ten weeks, but workers who wish to become 
foremen or journeymen ambitious for a master- 
ship may remain longer. These latter come again 
and again to the school and ultimately make 
their " masterpiece" to submit to the committee 
chosen by their trade organization to pass upon 
the work of would-be masters. 

Trade education for girls is not so well organ- 
ized in Berlin as that for boys. The situation is 
similar to that in America : woman's position 
in industry is far from settled ; the "housewife 
ideal" still dominates in many of the schools and, 
in others, exerts a disturbing influence on the 
regular trade courses. Every grade of institution, 

136 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

from the domestic science section of the Pesta- 
lozzi-Froebel Training School to the simplest com- 
mercial course, is represented, including many 
which are neither one thing nor the other, but 
attempt a little of both. Germany has not yet 
taken a stand on the woman problem, and edu- 
cation is temporizing with women in the schools. 

///. Munich 

The journey from the sandy plains of Branden- 
burg to the brilliant and invigorating upper airs 
of the Bavarian plateau is a physical change which 
prepares one for the greater crispness and verve 
of the Munich school method. Here the German 
system of industrial education is seen at its 
highest point- There are the same types of schools 
as in Berlin — a flexible series that drills the man 
at the machine and still gives outlet for ability 
into the upper ranks of industry. But the age 
limit for compulsory attendance is higher, the 
hours per week of required schooling, which 
come in the daytime, are never less than eight, 
and the training given is more balanced and 
complete. 

It may be questioned why the admittedly 
faulty systems of Paris and Berlin have been 
described at the expense of a satisfactory pro- 

137 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

gram which is thus relegated to a few concluding 
paragraphs. The reason for this is twofold. Paris 
and Berlin represent the kinds of school most 
common in America, — the former finding its 
feeble counterpart in the Manhattan Trade 
School for Girls, the Boston Trade School, and 
the new Wisconsin system ; and the latter being 
reduplicated, in its essential features, by the 
recent experiment in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. 
Furthermore, the best is always thrown into 
sharper relief by comparison with the next best, 
for the failures of the one illuminate the suc- 
cesses of the other. 

The Munich continuation school actively em- 
bodies in every dot and iota of the course of 
study Superintendent Kerschensteiner's phrase 
"maker of useful men," or better still, "usable 
men" ; and in the clear light of this purpose, the 
Berlin program seems negative and wavering, 
a weak compromise between academic and trade 
ideals. With a useful man in view, the Bavarian 
school tries to round out the scrappy shop train- 
ing of the apprentice with such studies as will 
give him a grasp on his whole trade. The trade 
can then use him as the exigency of the moment 
dictates. This grasp, to be complete, must be both 
theoretical and practical, and it is here that the 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

Munich educator takes issue with the Berlin 
method. Berhn maintains that dexterity in tech- 
nical processes can be acquired only in the factory, 
and so eliminates practice from the curriculum 
as a waste of valuable time better spent in gen- 
eral academic drill. Munich avers that unless 
the child is introduced in school to all the pro- 
cesses of his trade, the greater part of them will 
always remain a sealed book to him, and he will 
be, not at all "a usable man," but a narrow 
specialist, a miscroscopic part of a man, useful in 
a very limited field. Skill he can learn in busi- 
ness as need arises, but preliminary understand- 
ing of trade operations he must get in school 
in order to embrace opportunities for acquiring 
skill as they present themselves. 

The famous Prank Schule gives eight to thir- 
teen hour continuation courses for eleven sepa- 
rate trades, one of the most interesting of which 
is that for locksmiths. The technology, German, 
and physics recall the Berlin schedule, while 
physiology, hygiene, and Bible history explain 
themselves. Composition deals with all sorts of 
documents which might be written in the course 
of the trade. The German gift for exhausting a 
subject without killing originality is manifested 
in a detailed treatment of theme work seldom 

139 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

found in American schools. For instance, a class, 
representing a master locksmith, has written, at 
its last session, an order for a grindstone. This 
stone has supposedly been delivered in bad shape, 
a crack being plainly visible at its center. The 
manufacturing firm must now be apprised of the 
receipt of the stone, of its condition on arrival, of 
the supposed reasons for this condition, and as 
to whether it can be accepted or not. All these 
points having been brought out by class discus- 
sion, they are put upon the blackboard. Several 
pupils compose orally sentences conveying point 
one, which are criticized with an eye to grammar 
and style ; and when each point has been thus 
handled, a few oral versions for the whole letter 
are given. At a final signal, the boys write for 
themselves the proposed letter, which is subse- 
quently corrected and copied into a notebook for 
reference when the pupil is in business. The pace 
for such work is obviously set by the average, 
not by the best or even better pupils ; but as a 
result of this insistent thoroughness, the average 
rises with each successive year. 

First and second year mathematics is con- 
cerned with reckoning prices and materials. Here 
a remarkable amount of elementary economics 
enters incidentally. In determining the price to 

140 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

be charged for certain locks, boys of fourteen 
handle competition, rent, prime costs, profit, cost 
of living, and other bugbears of the college stu- 
dent with astounding familiarity and intelligence. 
In the third year, bookkeeping for a firm of lock- 
smiths is taken up. 

Much that is done in drawing-class is used in 
the workshops. The course aims at precision, 
and at understanding the specification drawing, 
the tool, the product, and the principles of its 
construction. 

The idea of the shopwork is to cover the most 
important operations of the trade and the mani- 
pulation of all its tools. Under this system few 
whole objects can be made, but there is talk of 
having the pupils make one complete thing in- 
stead of so many typical parts. The point at is- 
sue is whether what they lose in practice will be 
made up by what they gain in sense of unity and 
in the fineness of workmanship which comes from 
pride in the finished product. In this day of min- 
utely subdivided toil and of complete separation 
of the worker from the finished product, those 
two points have educational value which cannot 
be overstated. 

In the trade school for locksmiths having three 
or four years' experience, the work of the con- 

141 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

tinuation school is carried forward with more 
freedom for the individual to develop his own 
ideas, and with far greater emphasis on artistic 
production. Mathematics becomes algebra and 
geometry; drawing and modeling from nature 
are supplemented by lectures on the history of 
styles. The Museum of Industrial Art in Munich 
offers an unparalleled collection of artistic smith- 
work from various epochs, and study of this col- 
lection bears fruit in the practice classes, where 
many a lock, hinge, or clasp shows the inspiration 
of older models fashioned with a feeling for their 
architectural context which is lacking in much 
modern wrought iron. 

Every school in Munich tells the same story of 
correlation which makes the excellence of French 
trade education. But here the additional correla- 
tion with actual business practice is established. 
Apprentices and journeymen are studying under 
teachers formerly or even now foremen or super- 
intendents in industry. Moreover, they are not, 
as in Berlin, left to the mercy of industrial spec- 
ialization for their practice and are not studying 
in the abstract a trade with which their real ex- 
perience must be fragmentary. Every step in 
theoretical instruction is illustrated by the labor- 
atory method. The Munich teacher knows that 

142 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

an apprentice seldom performs the operations 
even of that branch of his trade at which his 
master is employed. The apprentice in the shop 
looks on, hands his fellow workman tools, helps a 
little here and there. But the pupil in the school 
has a chance to do at some time in his course 
almost everything common in trade practice. 

The range of subject-matter taught in Munich 
trade schools seems restricted in comparison with 
the Paris program. But it matters little what one 
has studied if one has acquired that asset more 
precious than encyclopedias of information — the 
ability to think. There is reason to believe that 
in doing one thing completely, the pupil develops 
a more thoughtful habit of mind ; and that, hav- 
ing learned by thoroughness in a smaller field 
how to think a thing out to the ultimate detail, 
he will be a more apt and creative workman and 
a more intelligent citizen. At least he will be in- 
dustrially resourceful, conversant with his whole 
trade, a useful, usable master of the iron hand. 

IV. Switzerland 

Before leaving the subject of foreign experi- 
ments at trade education, a word must be said 
about the mountain republic which has out- 
stripped the rest of the world in the matter of 

143 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

compulsory education. How often does it occur 
to the casual tourist that his clever Swiss land- 
lord and his apt Swiss servants owe much of their 
efficiency to training in a school for hotel keepers ? 
As he travels through the bowels of the earth or 
creeps around mountain shoulders behind the 
sturdy crouching engines of the Swiss railroad, 
does he reflect that in spite of Switzerland's 
meagre natural endowment, the tremendous ef- 
forts it has put forth to develop capable citizens 
have resulted in unparalleled engineering achieve- 
ments: in funiculars ; in model sanitoria and ho- 
tels ; in light and power industries, — indeed, in 
everything that can utilize the water power which 
is nature's chief gift ; in a perfection of watch- 
making absolutely unrivaled ; and in a profusion 
of efficient small producers who can maintain 
themselves independently against stupendous 
odds ? For a nation to live and prosper on Swiss 
soil seems flying in the face of Providence, and 
Switzerland has done it because she is, above all 
others, the land of public education for public 
usefulness. 

Swiss curricula present little that is new after 
a survey of French and German systems of vo- 
cational education. It is the fitting together link 
by link of a complete chain of industrial training, 

144 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

the strengthening of this chain by closely related 
labor and education laws, and the moral and finan- 
cial support of it by labor, capital, and the general 
public — it is this total program which renders 
Switzerland worthy of special study. 

A unique enactment passed in 1906 controls 
completely the conditions of apprenticeship in 
Switzerland, and since apprenticeship is so 
broadly interpreted as to cover any attempt by a 
minor at a gainful occupation, this law may be said 
to regulate child labor. No child under fifteen may 
enter any workshop or factory, and seldom may 
a minor work for more than ten hours per day. 
The proper care and instruction of apprentices 
by their employers is secured by elaborate regu- 
lations and a system of penalization under which 
an employer may forfeit his right to receive ap- 
prentices. In addition to this trade instruction 
given in the master's shop, the learner must be 
allowed certain time during his working day to 
attend the industrial, continuation, or general 
school in his district. Moreover, at the end of 
his apprenticeship, he is required by law and by 
trade union regulation to undergo a test of 
working ability; and many pupils who have 
passed the legal school age remain in various 
courses to prepare for this examination. 

145 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

In some Swiss cantons, school attendance is 
practically compulsory between the ages of six 
and nineteen, as pupils remain from six to four- 
teen in the primary grades, from fourteen to 
seventeen in the complementary or vocational 
school, and then follow courses preparatory for 
the obligatory examination for recruits. In the 
canton of Geneva, the child goes at three to the 
Ecole Enfantine, and at seven passes into the 
Ecole Primairey where mstruction in modern 
languages and manual training is begun. At thir- 
teen, he enters upon a two years* course in one 
of the following institutions : (i) Secondary rural 
schools ; (2) the Ecole Comple'mentairCf a part- 
time school, which " completes and develops pri- 
mary education from the point of view of trade 
practice adapted to the needs of the special lo- 
cality " ; or (3) the Ecole Professionjtelle, which 
is not a course for apprentices, but is comparable 
to our own manual training high schools. It pre- 
pares for any higher special school and aims to 
develop general capacity and intelligence. After 
fifteen, school attendance is nolonger compulsory, 
but " employers favor workers who follow higher 
courses,"^ and often subsidize those which their 
employees attend. 

1 Astier et Cuminal, Z' Enseignement Technique. 
146 



FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

Among higher courses, designed to train aver- 
age workmen, may be mentioned various night 
schools and several special schools giving trade 
preparation equivalent to apprenticeship, such as 
the Ecole des Metiers (for building-trades), the 
Ecole Mecamque and the Ecole d' Horologie, 
These schools emphasize practical instruction and 
give only such academic branches as bear directly 
upon the trades in hand. Even trade theory is not 
extensively developed in the curricula. The Tech- 
niciim may also be entered from the Ecole Pro- 
fessio7inelle, but is a more advanced school intended 
for the training of foremen in construction, civil, 
mechanical, and electrical engineering. While 
practice plays a large part in the instruction, it is 
not stressed so much as general trade theory, the 
Technicum being in this respect a contrast to the 
trade schools just described. From the secondary 
rural schools, country children may enter similarly 
graded courses in agricultural branches. Poly tech- 
nical and horticultural universities complete a 
system recalling the German plan, but even more 
comprehensive and far-reaching. 

The Swiss ideal is represented by the sequence 
of primary, professional, and technical schools 
embracing the more liberal features of both 
French and German systems. But the existence 

147 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

of the Ecole CompUmentaire (the part-time school 
in which early trade specialization appears) shows 
that in Switzerland, as in Germany, France, and 
America, economic pressure is too great to allow 
the mass of children to continue a general edu- 
cation beyond the grammar grades. The Lehr- 
werkstdtten^in Berne offer an interesting solution 
of this difficulty. In this school pupils are regu- 
larly apprenticed and at the expiration of the term 
are paid a wage for the time they have spent in 
the shops. The articles they produce are turned 
over to the trade union council for sale and thus 
friction with labor organizations because of school 
competition is avoided. Here, as throughout the 
entire field of Swiss vocational training, we see a 
harmonious cooperation of labor, capital, legisla- 
tive bodies, and educational authorities for the 
upbuilding of efficient citizenship and national 
prosperity. 

^ Public training-shops. 



X 

AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 

" Double, double, 
Toil and trouble! 
Fire burn 
And cauldron bubble." 

In that cauldron where the American trade school 
is brewing, bubbles a quantity of heterogeneous ex- 
periment — most of which has already been tried 
and found wanting abroad. "Experience keeps 
a dear school," but America will learn in no other. 
In our eagerness to meet the educational need of 
our time, we have not planned deliberately or 
studied our industrial situation in detail. Snatch- 
ing at a multitude of foreign programs without 
examining into their previous success, we try them 
at home ; and have not, so far, kept close enough 
account of their results to judge whether they 
have proved satisfactory here. 

These experiments group themselves as pre- 
paratory trade schools,^ i. e., schools which give 

1 This classification is borrowed from a leaflet published by 
the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education. 

149 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

a broad, general foundation in manual and aca- 
demic branches and fit the pupil to enter industry 
as a learner; trade schools for the average work- 
man, whose aim is to supplant apprenticeship; 
technical high schools designed to prepare for the 
upper ranks in industry ; and part-time and even- 
ing classes for persons already engaged in indus- 
try or commerce. 

It is evident that most of them are reduplica- 
tions of French and German types already dis- 
cussed. The outline on page 151 will show their 
foreign parentage at a glance. 

What has been said in the preceding chapter 
of the French and German schools may be here 
reiterated in more emphatic American terms; 
more emphatic because our industrial situation is 
more complex and fluid than that in any other 
country, and a rigid school method will therefore 
fall more quickly behind the times. Such scien- 
tific investigation of American methods as has 
been made points to the same conclusions as those 
already reached by European experts. 

The preparatory school, which gives a broad 
basis in manual training and academic branches, 
does not specialize along definite trade lines, but 
trains its students in general use of machinery 
and material so that when they enter any indus- 

150 



AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 



Munich Con- 
tinuation 
School 


Certain 
Private 
Corporation 
Schools for 
employees 


German Trade 
High School 


Technical 
High School 
to prepare for 
upper ranks of 
industry. 
Note, however, 
important dif- 
ference : 
The German 
student has al- 
ready complet- 
ed an appren- 
ticeship be- 
fore entering 
the School 


Berlin 
Continua- 
tion 
School 


Part Time 
and Evening 
Schools 
giving the 
theory with- 
out practice 


H 

G O 


Trade School 
for average 
workman, de- 
signed to 
supplant 
apprentice- 
ship 


Swiss 

" Professional " 

School 


General 
Preparatory 
Trade 
School 


Foreign 
Type 


American 
Type 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

try they are defter with their hands and more apt 
in learning new processes than the raw recruit 
without previous training. This school may, from 
one point of view, be classed with manual train- 
ing high schools, in that a diploma does not cer- 
tify bread-winning ability and that an apprentice- 
ship is still necessary after graduation. From the 
developmental point of view, the aims of the types 
are the same. But the preparatory trade school 
differs from the so-called manual training school 
in having a distinctly industrial bias. By empha- 
sizing the value of general education as a prepa- 
ration for industry, it catches many pupils who 
would otherwise leave school early to work in 
poorly paid and uneducative juvenile occupations. 
Such an institution is the Lawrence Industrial 
School at Lawrence, Massachusetts, ** devoted to 
opening up avenues to the industries and trades." 
As Lawrence is a textile center, the school work 
naturally enough borrows its subject-matter from 
textile industries. The three years' course com- 
prises business English, mill mathematics, book- 
keeping, industrial history, chemistry, mechanics 
and electricity, raw material, carding and spinning^ 
weaving and warp preparation, fabric analysis, de- 
signing, dyeing and finishing. Special dexterity in 
any one of the many processes involved in factory 

152 



AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 

work along these lines is not the aim. The course 
serves merely as a general introduction to the in- 
dustry and the industrial viewpoint. Pupils enter 
at fourteen ; graduate at seventeen. 

Such a course raises the question whether the 
graduate loses or gains industrially by spending 
in the schoolroom three years which might be 
devoted to acquiring that special manual skill by 
which he must ultimately earn his living. The 
advocate of this plan would be quick in his re- 
sponse that, at fourteen, no child has access to 
opportunities for acquiring skill, and that, if he 
goes to work, it will be in some position which 
leaves him farther behind than the preparatory 
school. But as Mr. Merritt, of the Yale-Towne 
Manufacturing Company, justly declares, " In 
considering the question of industrial education, 
one of the most important factors is the desire 
of children to earn something so that they will 
be independent, and also the desire of their par- 
ents to have them earn something to help to- 
ward the family support. ... In many cases 
where such trade schools have been started, it 
has been found difficult to get sufficient pupils 
to fill the schools because they prefer to get into 
some gainful occupation." An inquiry as to rea- 
sons for leaving school, made by the author 

153 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

among trade union locals in Kansas City, sub- 
stantiates this observation. A frequent answer, 
tinged with regret, was, ''Most of us stayed in 
school as long as we could afford it." 

Until recently, trade schools which design to 
supplant apprenticeship have been almost the sole 
exponents of the industrial ideal in this country. 
The industrial field, for which one department of 
a well-known school of this kind prepares, has been 
exhaustively investigated by the Russell Sage 
Foundation Committee on Women's Work, and 
application of their findings to this type of insti- 
tution seems warranted. The committee selected 
for special study that part of millinery known as 
"trimming," but as trade terms are very loosely 
employed in the business, their work had a much 
wider range. Two hundred women workers in the 
industry in New York City were interviewed at 
their homes by the committee's agents, who ques- 
tioned them as to the number of positions they 
had held, the salaries received, the periods of em- 
ployment, and the opportunities given for learn- 
ing the trade, and as to whether they had ever at- 
tended a trade school. If so, the workers were 
asked how the school training had helped them 
in their work. The shop was then visited and 
the employer's opinion of the trade school grad- 

154 



AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 

uate and the need for industrial training obtained. 
The school attended was finally inspected and 
the classroom work examined in the light of the 
knowledge of trade needs previously gained. 
The results of this unique and systematic study 
recall the statements of the Parisian League 
for the Encouragement of Apprenticeship and 
are even more startlingly conclusive. The com- 
mittee's conclusions may be summarized briefly 
as follows: (i) Academic training given in con- 
nection with trade work is insufficient. (2) The 
courses are not long enough to give thoroughness 
and skill. " The experience of millinery workers 
would seem to suggest that in modern times, 
perhaps even more than in the days when indus- 
trial conditions were less complex, apprenticeship 
must include learning the trade, as well as one 
process in it, if the workers are to be efficient. 
. . . Ability to adapt is of primary importance. 
. . . Yet pyschology and practical experience 
make it clear that such ability cannot be given in 
a six months* course." (3) There is not enough 
practice on single processes, and not enough va- 
riety in work. (4) Few of the courses use exclu- 
sively real trade material. (5) Many of the teach- 
ers are not experienced practical milliners. (6) 
The pupils do not, therefore, learn the trade as 

155 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

it actually is ; they are not ready to take hold and 
do something at once when they enter a shop. 
(7) The school takes girls too young, and there- 
fore graduates them too young to place them- 
selves advantageously in the trade. (8) The 
school augments the oversupply of workers, 
which is a principal reason for the pitifully low 
wages and the slack seasons prevalent in the 
industry. 

It appears here, as in Paris, that the school 
divorces itself from actual trade practice in spite 
of an earnest effort to meet the industrial needs 
of the day. " Our trade schools are no good. It's 
altogether different outside," said one millinery 
girl. How to make such courses automatically 
self-testing, and thus prevent lapses from current 
methods, is a difficult problem. The particular 
trade school under discussion has kept no system- 
atic track of its graduates and hence cannot 
judge of the results of its work ; and the temp- 
tation is great for the busy teacher to lose touch 
with the almost vertiginous progress of an indus- 
try which, at the beginning of her pedagogic 
career, she probably knew from A to Z. The 
industrial torrent rushes rapidly on, but the 
pupil is caught for the length of the training 
course in an eddy beside the stream. The more 

156 



AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 

complicated the trade, and the longer the course, 
the more urgent becomes this objection. 

The same indecision between training for the 
home and training for the trade which charac- 
terizes the Berlin continuation school for girls is 
felt in our trade schools for girls as well. The 
short course barely gives time for one line, and 
a combination of two ideals precludes thorough- 
ness in either. Admitting to trade schools girls 
who do not intend to earn their living by what 
they learn, also lowers the standard of school 
work. There is not that atmosphere of earnest 
steadiness and painstaking care which must char- 
acterize the successful worker in industry. 

Technical high schools, of secondary grade, 
indeed, but still attempting to raise the manual 
worker in the ranks of industry and fit him for 
responsible positions, are open to the same criti- 
cisms. The Technical High School in Cleveland, 
Ohio, belongs to this group. The ideal of the 
school is at once apparent in its course of study: 
the shopwork for the first year being turning and 
cabinet-making ; for the second, pattern-making, 
founding and forging; for the third, m.achine 
shop practice ; and being, for the last of the third 
and all of the fourth, concentrated on some spe- 
cial branch. Depth and thoroughness are not so 

157 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

much the aim as breadth and general capacity. 
To prepare the way for business adaptabiUty, and 
executive advancement is the object. 

Evening schools for persons already in indus- 
try are the most common and the oldest method 
for helping working people educationally. Cul- 
tural branches have, as a rule, formed the back- 
bone of such courses. Of late, actual trade in- 
struction has encroached upon the academic 
preserves of the night school, and we find two 
distinctly industrial types of courses : one offer- 
ing general technical instruction, and the other 
giving special practice work intended to supple- 
ment the highly specialized shop training of the 
modern worker. Excellent examples of all three 
of these classes abound. The evening school has 
stormed the most conservative educational cita- 
dels. Those who oppose trade education in gen- 
eral as class education, and an undemocratic 
converging of the lines of opportunity upon one 
focus, welcome enthusiastically any effort to lift 
the laborer from the industrial pit into which he 
falls without it. The utility of the night school 
as a solution for the industrial training problem 
is, however, to be gravely questioned. For the 
young worker it is most unfortunate. The strain 
of a long day's labor in a factory or shop is 

158 



AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 

enough, if not too much, for the growing child. 
And even if there were no danger from over- 
strain, a child's mind is not in trim to profit by 
evening teaching after a day of toil. Neither do 
the short evening hours give opportunity for 
thorough and comprehensive instruction. It is 
also doubtful wisdom to give young and irre- 
sponsible boys and girls an excuse for staying 
out night after night alone. If the evening 
school has a legitimate function, it is certainly 
for adults. Yet even here the question obtrudes 
itself, " Is not the evening school a makeshift 
way of compensating for previous deficiencies in 
training } " When the public does for its young 
people all it should in the way of preliminary 
education, the night school will die. It is, figura- 
tively speaking, the educational vanguard, a com- 
promise which the public makes with the mi- 
nority who have begun to demand, but have not 
yet attained, their full rights. However far for- 
ward we may push the night school, it must still 
be regarded as a temporizing measure, useful 
only in helping adults to combat unfair condi- 
tions of early training or present employment. 

There remains to be considered the part-time 
school for those engaged in commerce or indus- 
try. This has, in America, assumed two forms : 

159 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

the private apprenticeship school conducted by 
certain large corporations, and a few scattered 
experiments like Lewis Institute in Chicago 
and the Fitchburg, Massachusetts, High School, 
The latter reproduces in its essential features 
the Berlin system of continuation schools. The 
chief difference is the time divisions between 
school and work ; in place of the six hours spent 
in school by the Berlin child, the Fitchburg plan 
provides alternate weeks of school and shop- 
work. The school instruction is purely academic 
and theoretical ; practical skill must be gained 
in the factories of the business concerns coop- 
erating with the school board. This plan not 
only presents all the drawbacks of the Berlin 
program in leaving the child's practice work to 
the hit-or-miss tactics of industrial specializa- 
tion, but raises a serious problem by the duplica- 
tion of the apprentice force involved. In a small 
scale experiment, this danger might not become 
apparent, but if universally applied, would it not 
lead directly to the equipping of twice the num- 
ber of workmen needed in industry .? Lewis In- 
stitute offers certain improvements upon the 
Fitchburg plan in the way of shop practice, ten 
hours of the school week being devoted to found- 
ing, pattern-making, machine construction and 

1 60 



AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 

forging, but the duplication of the apprentice 
force remains. 

The Munich program, which has proved most 
efficient among foreign schools, is carried out in 
the United States only in a modified form and 
by certain wealthy corporations. The apprentice- 
ship schools of the General Electric Company, 
the Westinghouse Company, the New York Cen- 
tral Railroad, and a dozen other well-known and 
prosperous concerns attest the success and econ- 
omy of this method of training workmen. In 
drafting a final program for public trade edu- 
cation, study of these institutions must play a 
prominent part. The instruction there given may 
be narrow from an academic and cultural point 
of view, but it comprises the necessary industrial 
elements. It teaches what business needs ; the 
public schools would add what society and hu- 
manity need. The General Electric Company's 
school devotes seven and one half hours per 
week to theory and fifty-five hours to shop prac- 
tice in training-rooms equipped for this special 
purpose. This plan secures both the advantages 
of the French school, where the work is done 
under the eye of an instructor, and identification 
with actual conditions of manufacture — an ideal 
opportunity which none but the most powerful 

i6i 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

of corporations can supply, and which is most 
nearly approximated in the educational world by 
the part-time continuation school, including gen- 
eral practice in the curriculum. 

The Yale-Towne Manufacturing Company has, 
for several years past, had in operation such an 
apprenticeship system which is in effect a practi- 
cal trade school, producing men for its own work, 
but also men who could readily adapt themselves 
to any mechanical operations. Apprentices are 
paid increasing wages during a four years' course, 
at the end of which a certificate of graduation is 
awarded, together with a cash bonus if service 
has been satisfactory. All graduates are encour- 
aged to remain in the employ of the company and 
are given substantial increase in wages when they 
enter upon their career as journeymen. The in- 
struction of these apprentices is carried on in 
special training-rooms under expert teachers in 
the different grades of work manufactured and 
in the handling and repairing of machine tools. 
Opportunity is given to show inventive ability. 
Each apprentice is taught individually and is 
advanced in accordance with his ability. After 
about two years in the training-rooms, the ap- 
prentices are usually placed in different depart- 
ments of the factory, where they work with 

162 



AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 

journeymen and come more closely in touch with 
the regular factory routine. 

To acquaint them with the science which lies 
behind the design of the machines and tools, and 
with the problems they must meet later on as 
foremen, the apprentices are required to attend 
educational classes provided by the company. 
For these sessions, which fall during working- 
hours, they are paid the same as when at the 
bench. The course of study comprises arithme- 
tic, elementary algebra, mensuration, elementary 
trigonometry, elements of mechanics, power 
transmission, strength of material, mechanism, 
mechanical drawing, machine design, and jig and 
fixture design. In addition, the superintendents 
and foremen give practical talks relating to the 
trades. These classes usually occupy six hours 
per week, twelve weeks constituting a term, and 
three terms, a year. Advancement is contingent 
upon passing an examination at the end of each 
term. 

The results of this school have thus far been 
beneficial to both the apprentices and the com- 
pany. In quite a number of cases at the end of 
the second year, when the apprentices have be- 
come skillful enough to run an ordinary machine, 
such as a lathe or a milling-machine, they have 

163 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

been drawn off from their course by the offer of 
high wages from some outside shop. During the 
recent rush to make automobiles, for example, 
the automobile shops offered unreasonably high 
wages for only fairly skilled hands ; and yet these 
opportunities to work before completing the 
course show that the apprentices were receiving 
in the Yale-Towne shops a training measurable 
in dollars and cents, and sufficiently flexible to 
admit of ready industrial re-adjustment. 

In classification of the multiform departures 
along this newest educational byroad, many nu- 
merous and valuable experiments have necessarily 
eluded pigeon-holing ; and the line of demarca- 
tion between the several classes suggested has 
been difficult to determine. No two courses are 
alike; no two have even the same ideal. Each 
has been shaped by the personal bias and the 
general observation of some individual or groups 
of individuals rather than by a systematic study 
of the industrial conditions they were designed 
to meet. American treatment of the subject has 
been deductive rather than inductive — a result 
probably of the fact that the movement has been 
under the wing of the educational authorities 
with strong preconceived ideas and academic in- 
terests. Within the past few years a different 

164 



AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 

school of enthusiasts has arisen who cry out against 
present educational methods as sterile and futile, 
who would eliminate from the course of study all 
unnecessary and unj^ractical fields of culture, and 
train our children with a single eye to working 
and earning capacity. Neither camp has as yet 
possessed the whole truth about trade education. 
The man who would over-academize trade educa- 
tion robs it of its function and virility. The over- 
practical enthusiast who measures teaching by 
dollars and cents, and discards everything that has 
no immediate industrial utility, robs the child of 
his educational birthright. Man is made for more 
than wage-earning, but man has a right to wage- 
earning ability, for *' his further development 
along cultural and other lines is conditioned by 
his capacity to support himself." 

No discussion of trade education in America 
would be complete if it disregarded those indus- 
trial schools for the negro, which led in a move- 
ment that has now extended to black, red, and 
white alike. Even during the pioneer stages of 
negro education, the faculties of Hampton and 
Tuskegee Institutes held that broader conception 
of industrial training which saves the trade school 
from pure utilitarianism. With them it was never 
the trade for trade's sake, but always the trade 

165 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

for the man's sake. These two great schools were 
not organized to train labor, but to uplift and 
rehabilitate a race. Forty years ago Hampton 
Institute was a living embodiment of the convic- 
tion that education is the most fundamental 
method of social betterment ; and forty years 
ago, by erecting education on a firm vocational 
basis, Hampton Institute struck the keynote of 
true constructive philanthropy. Shortsighted 
people have both praised and censured industri- 
al training for the negro on the ground that it 
will confine him to his proper or improper sphere. 
Results have set at naught both these narrow 
inferences. Industrial education has paved the 
way for negro advancement by giving to every 
black the one right of every man of any color — 
the right to be of some use in the world. 



XI 



THE TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED IN THE 
UNITED STATES 

A CLEAR-CUT ideal is the first step toward draft- 
ing a workable program. What, then, shall be the 
aim of American industrial education ? What fin- 
ished or unfinished product shall our trade school 
strive to graduate ? Certainly neither theorist nor 
specialist. Highly skilled specialists are, how- 
ever, what industry undoubtedly needs and lacks. 
But why does it lack them ? Not because industry 
could not train specialists ; but because the proper 
material out of which to make specialists is un- 
available. Our trouble with present workmen is 
basic lack of trade intelligence and mental train- 
ing, which prevents progress from lower to higher 
forms of work. It is the basis for skilled speciali- 
zation, for mobility, for executive capacity which 
the trade school must furnish. General intelli- 
gence, general trade theory, general trade prac- 
tice : these are the essentials. We may add to the 
old-time educational ideal one word, and read as 
our objective purpose, " the all-around workm2in." 

167 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

The history of the trade school in our country 
has been so far this : consciousness of the inad- 
equacy of academic education ; expensive but too 
often superficial investigation of foreign schools 
or schools in other American cities, with an eye 
to courses of study and ideals rather than results ; 
vague canvass of the business pubHc to measure 
the desire for better trained workmen ; drafting in 
the educational sanctum sanctonim, a program 
which first meets the light of day and the eye of 
practical criticism in the shape of a school built 
and in operation ; hiring instructors who have once 
been engaged in industry, but who must now 
teach year after year, often summer and winter, 
and who thus lose touch with progress in their 
trades ; admitting any and every pupil, whether 
actually destined for a self-supporting career or 
not ; finding places for a few graduates, but in 
almost no instance keeping systematic track of 
each pupil with a view to testing and reconstruct- 
ing classroom work in the light of its failure or 
success as a preparation for industry. 

Needless to say, this procedure began at the 
wrong end, soon left solid ground, and has been 
navigating the upper airs of educational theory 
ever since. Much really excellent work has been 
accomphshed by American industrial schools. 

i68 



TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 

But the whole subject is, as yet, nebulous ; we 
do not know how successful we have been or just 
where we have failed. Instead of duplicating 
untested curricula, instead of blindly following 
the blind and investing in expensive educational 
plants which experience may prove to be unpro- 
fitable, let us preface the grounding of vocational 
schools by a careful survey of our industrial needs 
and a rigorous testing of the work of already 
established institutions. 

Fundamental questions to be answered at the 
start are : what industries the school must feed ; 
at what age these industries take on helpers ; 
what sort of work beginners do ; what training 
they are given in the shop ; and how many new 
helpers per year these industries require. We 
must know what per cent of workers are women ; 
must determine woman's stability as an industrial 
factor, and see whether it be true that the aver- 
age woman worker merely passes through indus- 
try on her way to marriage. We must know the 
working conditions and wage scales for these in- 
dustries, and the qualities upon which promotion 
depends. We must put ourselves thoroughly in 
touch with the workers themselves as well as 
with the employers, and a labor union may have 
as much to teach us as the manufacturer. The 

169 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

trade school should look impartially to the good 
of the greatest number ; it must not ally itself 
with any special interest ; must remember that 
what industry can get out of its workers is no 
more important than what workers can get 
out of industry. What the trade needs can be 
learned from the trade alone ; but for what the 
man needs that the trade may not victimize him, 
we must go to his living as well as to his working 
conditions. Businessmen, foremen, journeymen, 
trade union members, educators, and philanthro- 
pists must join in drafting the program. 

Rigorous testing of the work of already estab- 
lished schools ought to have been done from the 
very beginning by the schools themselves. Each 
graduate should be followed for several years and 
the value of his preparation measured in his own 
and his employer's eyes. Only thus can the school 
tell whether it is furnishing industry what in- 
dustry needs ; only thus, if at all, can a once flaw- 
less curriculum be kept abreast of the times ; 
and only thus can we tell what to save and 
what to discard in grounding new vocational 
institutions. 

Since no such exhaustive study has yet been 
made, we are scarcely ready to pronounce upon 
what kind of trade education will produce the 

170 



TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 

all-round workman demanded by American in- 
dustry. It is, however, certain that only a very 
flexible form which will continually readjust itself 
to changing industrial conditions and be continu- 
ally and automatically tested by industry, can sat- 
isfy our needs. We require, furthermore, the sys- 
tem which will never create an artificial supply 
of workers and which will be at once most econo- 
mical of time and of results. Can we best attain 
these ends by preparing for, by supplanting or 
by supplementing apprenticeship } Which of these 
systems has proved most effective in Europe ? 
The Munich contimiation school, with its obliga- 
tory supplcmejiting of wage work for apprentices 
already placed ifi commeixe a7id industry. Which 
system do our successful business enterprises in 
America embody in their training schools for 
apprentices '^. Theoretical instruction and general 
exercises in practice are given under the eye of 
a teacher y but the learner is also put into the fac- 
tory to work side by side with journeymen who 
are producing for the market. No set instruction 
can supplant drill at the machine under com- 
mercial pressure; nothing can give such timely 
correction to the inevitable classroom inflexibil- 
ity. General trade knowledge, general trade prac- 
tice may be acquired in the school ; speed, dex- 

171 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

terity, and the verification of classroom knowl- 
edge come in the trade; and by a combination 
of these experiences, time is greatly economized^ 
the pupil is able to earn while he learns, and 
emerges from his training more intelligent, re- 
sourceful, and competent. The school for gener- 
alizing, the factory for specializing — a continuous 
and clarifying interaction ! — a flexible self-test- 
ing system whose courses cannot well lag behind 
the times, since every pupil is conversant with 
actual business conditions ! 

To decide that the school shall perfect our pre- 
sent labor force determines when definite trade 
instruction should begin. Certainly not before the 
working age. Premature specialization dwarfs the 
mind and ties the child down for life to the pos- 
sibilities of a few simple reflexes. Youth has a 
right to growing time. There is necessary, too, 
for intelligent work, a substratum of culture and 
mental drill, to furnish which a complete gram- 
mar course uninvaded by bread-and-butter respon- 
sibilities is none too long. We may begin early in 
the school life, however, to lay the foundation for 
trade dexterity, as well as trade intelligence, by 
introducing manual training into the grades. What 
psychology calls basic skill (whether mental or 
motor) is acquired very early, probably before the 

172 



TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 

twelfth year. If broad muscular adaptability is 
gained in the grammar grades, the child will come 
to the higher school — trade or academic — self- 
controlled, effective, and able to lay hold of 
special processes without fumbling. 

What balance shall be maintained between the 
academic and vocational, the theoretic and prac- 
tical elements in the trade school curriculum? 
We have already seen that theory and practice 
must go hand in hand to produce an all-round 
workman and that the school cannot safely leave 
practice to the shop. The other question is far 
more difficult to answer. Yet we must remember 
that by inserting the word " work " in the old edu- 
cational rubric, we have not changed its import. 
The test of education has always been utility ; the 
Latin high school, the academic college course 
were once vocational. Now that new lines of ac- 
tivity come into being, new sorts of work need 
to be done, we change, not the method, but the 
matter. The oft-drawn contrast between liberal 
and practical education does not exist. Both 
mathematics and chemistry develop thought 
power, similar, except for the sphere in which the 
thinking is done. The student of language receives 
what is for him a practical education, and yet 
language study is commonly denominated a liberal 

173 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

or cultural branch. All good education is both 
practical and liberal ; and the training which was 
once practical for preachers and lawyers is no more 
liberal than that which is to-day practical for en- 
gineers, machinists, or men of business. 

If there is no inherent difference between pro- 
fessional and trade education, then whatever in 
the one is calculated to broaden the vision, 
strengthen the mind and quicken the sensibilities, 
is equally proper to the other. Mathematics, 
science, geography, history, language, literature, 
music and art — these are subjects of universal 
applicability, universal utility. But because the 
young industrial worker has no further apparent 
use for the half-developed material of his gram- 
mar course, he forgets it. Mary Woolman ^ points 
out that the majority of girls enter the trade 
school with a very meager general education in 
which they are not interested because it seems to 
them useless, but that when they see its bearing 
on their daily tasks, they desire to study further. 
The practical instruction is thus their first glimpse 
into the world of culture. Indeed, " those whose 
environment is work, find more culture in a trade 
than in a purely academic school." It opens their 
eyes to the real vitality of what has before seemed 

1 Formerly head of Manhattan Trade School for Girls. 



TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 

dead knowledge, but without which, mere manual 
dexterity is profitless. 

Certain narrowly utilitarian advocates of indus- 
trial training, who are not less one-sided in their 
view than the devotees of so-called higher edu- 
cation, would reproduce in the trade school that 
very unfavorable industrial situation which it is 
designed to combat. Yet the vocational idea has 
not come thus to pare down the man to fit his in- 
dustrial niche and to strike cultural subjects from 
school curricula, but to preempt and till new fields 
for culture. Man is a composite ; toil is not his 
only aspect. Education must develop not merely 
efficient producers, but efficient consumers ; and 
it must provide resource from work as well as 
preparation for work. Rhythm is the law of life ; 
but there is no rhythm in the existence of one who 
has never learned the secret of recreation. This 
secret is not in alternating work and idleness, for 
nature abhors a vacuum and idleness is not pos- 
sible for the human mind. The old chord of work 
will go on vibrating even during enforced physi- 
cal quiet if some other chord is not touched. A 
wide range of interests is therefore necessary for 
sane and wholesome living ; and anything which 
will develop broader sympathies and open up new 
modes of recreation — all those features of modern 

175 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

schooling which are too frequently stigmatized as 
decorative frills — are in the highest human sense 
utilitarian. 

The object of vocational education is civic as 
well as human and industrial ; is, as our preface 
stated, to hold pupils in school until they are pre- 
pared for citizenship. Therefore, history and civics 
belong here even more emphatically than in the 
academic school, since to the trade school will 
come eighty per cent of our voting public. 

In short, we conclude that the trade school 
must not only train dextrous workers, but give, 
in terms of the working pupil's life, the mental 
drill he misses by not attending an orthodox high 
school. 

The character of work to be done in the voca- 
tional school determines the qualities desirable 
in teachers and superintendents. In the reaction 
against academic ideals and methods, instruction 
in trade schools, and even their management, is 
often confided to persons with wide trade knowl- 
edge and experience, but without pedagogic 
training. Most of the instructors in the Worces- 
ter, Massachusetts, trade high school, for in- 
stance, had been foremen in local shops before 
taking their present positions. One of the masters 
voluntarily remarked to the author, "I am not a 

176 



TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 

trained teacher and when I came into the school, 
I knew almost nothing about how to present a 
subject to my pupils. I knew how things ought 
to be done, but to show the boys and make them 
understand was another matter, To show thirty 
boys at once was quite different from showing 
one greenhorn in the factory." Here was a man 
who knew industry well, who had just the infor- 
mation of which his pupils stood in need, but 
who was handicapped by lack of transmitting 
power. Before he could teach, he must learn how 
by lengthy practice on the youths who came to 
him for instruction. On the other hand, there 
was, in one of the academic branches, a profes- 
sional high school teacher quite unacquainted 
with the trade needs of the boys under her jur- 
isdiction. She was teaching in accordance with 
the old academic ideals and completely vitiating 
any vocational atmosphere which her subject 
might have had. In this one school were pre- 
sented both horns of the dilemma which con- 
fronts us in an attempt to secure for the trade 
school an efficient faculty. The workman cannot 
teach and the teacher cannot work. For this new 
field we need a new educational birth molded of 
trade and scholastic ideals. The successful trade 
school teacher must be broadly educated, peda- 

177 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

gogically trained, and industrially practiced if he 
is to develop at all points the capacities of his pu- 
pils. The mere mechanic whose vision is limited 
by factory walls will perhaps (after he has learned 
to instruct them) make adroit workers of his pu- 
pils. But he will not be able to widen their outlook 
upon life or even upon industry beyond the nar- 
row view which they might obtain by serving an 
apprenticeship in the factory which shaped the 
master. 

Awake to the fact that vocational training is 
not merely a trade but an educational problem, 
some European countries have special normal 
courses preparatory for trade school positions 
and require, in addition to this theoretical train- 
ing, not only that the teacher must have been em- 
ployed in industry before his pedagogic career be- 
gins, but that while he is engaged in teaching, he 
must still spend part of his time in a factory of 
the type for which he prepares his pupils. Thus 
it is hoped to obtain as instructors both good me- 
chanics and broad-minded, well-balanced men of 
practical culture. 

But what will supplementary courses do for 
the unfortunate young people who have, as yet, 
no job worthy of the name of trade ? What of the 
thousands of children in the so-called juvenile oc- 

17S 



TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 

cupations where " the best is like the worst " ? 
What of messenger boys ? Office boys ? Errand 
boys? What of the entirely unoccupied child ?^ 
The Manufacturers' Association in its 1908 con- 
vention disapproved of founding schools for youths 
already employed in legitimate commerce and in- 
dustry until those outside had been provided for, 
justly arguing that they stood most in need of 
assistance. To help the man who already has a 
job and desert the poor devil who can't, through 
lack of training, procure one, seems an over-cruel 
application of the parable, " to him that hath 
shall be given." Here appears the true function 
of what we have called the preparatory trade 
school. There is no future in his own calling for 
which we can perfect the messenger boy, but we 
may perhaps open up avenues to better employ- 
ment in other lines by giving general manual, 
mechanic, and business training which can be 
turned to good use in any trade. Perhaps, too, 
when continuation schools are once established, 
it will not be so hard for young workers to gain 
entrance to desirable occupations. Employers 
may be willing to take on apprentices when they 
know that the whole burden of training will not 

1 " Probably child idleness is a more serious matter in the 
United States to-day than child labor." Richard T. Ely. 

179 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

fall on commerce and industry ; when they know 
that juvenile helpers will no longer be a static, 
unskilled element in their labor force. 

In a report of the National Society for the 
Promotion of Industrial Education, we read that 
the industrial improvement course has assumed 
and will probably continue to assume the form of 
an evening school. So long as vocational self-im- 
provement remains optional, this will undoubt- 
edly be the case save where an exceptionally pro- 
gressive employer cooperates with the educational 
authorities, as in Ludlow, Fitchburg, Cincinnatti, 
and Chicago. But should continuation courses be 
made obligatory, time for them can be taken (as 
it must be if the best results are to be accom- 
plished) from the working day and such shifts 
arranged as will not necessitate reduplication of 
the apprentice force. Indeed, claiming this 
educational birthright of general intelligence, 
trade theory and practice cannot be left to un- 
guided whim, which may barter it for a little 
more ready money, for early independence, for 
any will-o'-the-wisp of youthful short-sightedness 
or parental self-seeking. Vocational training must 
be made obligatory. 



XII 

CHOOSING A VOCATION 

In discussing the difficulty with which youths en- 
ter desirable occupations, we have stressed chiefly 
their lack of training for skilled work. But the 
difficulty is also traceable to an ignorance of the 
desirability or undesirability of various occupa- 
tions, which leads to a short-sighted initial choice 
and a permanent check in advancement. Ignor- 
ant of their mental or bodily unfitness for a trade, 
thousands of our most promising young people 
get into uncongenial, spirit-breaking toil, or prac- 
tically commit suicide by taking up tasks for 
which their physique is inadequate. Lured by a 
comparatively high beginning wage, children 
wander into industrial cul-de-sacs^ and students 
estimate that the largest per cent of unemploy- 
ment is among persons who have been pushed 
out by the younger generation from trades 
offering neither prospect of advancement nor 
training for other lines of activity. English poor- 
houses are filling with men and women unfitted 
for any but a pauper's life by their ill-starred at- 

i8i 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

tempts at early self-support. The same waste of 
human resources is apparent in our own country. 
The Massachusetts Commission on Industrial 
Education found twenty-five thousand children 
between the ages of fourteen and sixteen who 
were engaged in the lowest unskilled forms of 
industry ; and Dr. Kingsbury's investigation in- 
to the conditions of their employment showed 
what a bleak industrial future they could antici- 
pate. 

Trade schools of the type suggested in the pre- 
ceding chapter will only partially obviate the 
dangers of mischosen occupation. For the child 
already engaged in a trade where progress is 
possible, they will open the door to promotion. 
For the child caught in some mesh of toil with 
no outlook for the future, they will open the door 
of escape. But they cannot save children from 
getting into the wrong job, and conserve the 
time, ability, and potential accomplishment 
wasted by our hit-or-miss method of choosing a 
vocation. No amount of industrial education can 
fit a child well for something to which he is un- 
adapted, and, until we make sure that our young 
men and women go into the work to which they 
are best suited and which will give them the best 
chance of rising in the industrial scale, elaborate 

182 



CHOOSING A VOCATION 

systems of trade education will not repay the in- 
vestment which they represent. Trade schools 
need a supplementary measure to utilize most 
effectually their possibilities ; and this supple- 
mentary measure is systematic guidance of youth 
in selecting an occupation. The boy or girl 
emerging from the shelter of school life into the 
hurly-burly of business, needs to be told the facts 
about openings which present themselves. They 
cannot judge for themselves because trade has 
shut itself up in factories with No Admittance 
signs across the workroom doors. If the child 
consults an employee as to the nature of a busi- 
ness, he hears of single processes performed day 
after day without variation — and, considered 
singly, the processes of one trade are about the 
same and about as unattractive as those of any 
other. The child must be made to understand 
that no employer of high-grade help wants a 
worker who has spent the formative years of his 
life as a messenger or errand boy, drifting from 
job to job and forming irregular, shiftless habits 
inimical to business efficiency. He needs to be 
shown the wisdom of starting in a skilled trade 
at a low wage rather than in an unskilled, blind- 
alley trade at a temptingly high one. He should 
also be cautioned against unsanitary occupations. 

183 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

The immigrant child ought surely to be warned 
of industrial pitfalls in the trades at which aliens 
snatch so helplessly while struggling for a foot- 
hold on American soil. Such systematic voca- 
tional guidance, nation-wide in range of vision, 
could distribute more rationally our foreign in- 
flux, since it is timidity and ignorance of other 
opportunities which bind immigrants to huddled 
quarters in seacoast towns. The finer qualities 
of our immigrant population, those spiritual and 
intellectual traits which should brighten and 
vary the pattern of American life, we stifle by 
thrusting the new arrival into a treadmill of 
drabbest American toil out of which he comes 
shorn of most that is foreign and stimulating in 
mind and manners. The evils introduced into 
our country by immigration are bruited abroad 
at the expense of the good, the racial freshness, 
the poetry, and the peculiar talents which an 
enlightened policy would cultivate till, under 
more favorable environment, they blossomed like 
rare exotics in American gardens. To guide im- 
migrant children into occupations adapted to 
preserve and develop their valuable racial assets 
would, perhaps, prove the sanest way of Ameri- 
canizing our new citizens. 

The child not only lacks knowledge of the 

184 



CHOOSING A VOCATION 

different trades, but he needs to be stimulated 
to think of his own qualifications as a worker. 
"Know thyself," said the old philosopher, and 
surely, in the choice of a vocation, self-knowledge 
is the beginning of wisdom. Yet it would seem 
that self-knowledge is a lost art of the romantic 
age. People are interested more and more in 
outward, objective things, forgetting that things 
are important only for their value and that value 
is an expression of personality. An inspiring 
fact about charitable and corrective work is that 
it gives us better methods of handling normal 
individuals. Maud Miner ^ recently said of way- 
ward girls, " All these fallen women have ambi- 
tions, ideals, and talents just as have the rest ot 
us. It is the task of the probation officer to get 
hold of these, quicken them and sustain them 
till they carry the girl out of her life of shame 
into one of honorable activity." Just as have the 
rest of us ! There is the kernel of significant 
truth. Who knows what funds of usefulness are 
yearly squandered in people who come to noth- 
ing — good or bad — because their real abilities 
have never been given proper outlet in activity ? 
And who can hesitate to prophesy that the 

^ Secretary of the Probation Association and formerly pro- 
bation officer in the New York Night Court. 

i8s 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

national happiness and prosperity would be a 
hundred fold augmented if every human being 
could industrially find himself and do just that 
thing he came into the world to do ? 

Not only what trade the child shall follow, but 
what further studies, if any, he shall pursue, is 
usually decided at the end of the grammar school 
course. Here is the crucial moment when children 
looking aimlessly for a job can be economically 
and permanently helped. To the oft-repeated 
question, "What can the grammar schools do for 
industrial education ? " we therefore answer, not 
only, " prepare for trade instruction by basic man- 
ual training," but " emphasize the fact that school 
looks toward life rather than toward learning, by 
directing graduates into a congenial vocation or 
an institution preparing therefor." Thus should 
we better the old educational economy, which 
saved at the spigot and wasted at the bunghole 
in compelling school attendance and then al- 
lowing enormous leakage between school and 
work. 

To guide children in the choice of a career 
necessitates a detailed, inclusive knowledge of in- 
dustrial, commercial, professional, and agricul- 
tural conditions, which can scarcely be expected 
of a teacher. Here is the function of the voca- 

i86 



CHOOSING A VOCATION 

tional expert. In school activity, as in all funda- 
mental social endeavor, a reliable body of compre- 
hensive statistics as to our industrial situation is 
thus seen to be imperative. To ground a system 
of vocational education ; to draft a course of study 
for a trade school ; to give the grammar school 
graduate adequate counsel when he vacillates be- 
tween idleness, further schooling, or immediate 
work of a dozen types — to do any one of these 
things, we must know the facts as to our business 
world. In every community a thorough investiga- 
tion of living and working conditions, kept up to 
date by periodic tallying, would be a paying in- 
vestment. To its records would go the agitator 
for factory regulation, the student of woman and 
child labor, the advocate of a minimum wage, the 
unionist eager to fix a standard living wage, the 
Consumers' League preparing a list of fair houses 
or granting the label to manufactured goods, the 
housing expert, and the reformer combating the 
social evil or fighting for more generous recrea- 
tion facilities. From such a survey, all movements 
for social betterment would draw the facts where- 
by to shape their programs. It would keep a steady 
finger on the pulse of life, and experience in such 
an investigation would be invaluable training for 
the various forms of constructive effort, as it 

1Z7 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

would give balance of mind and insight into the 
underlying sources of social disorder. 

The work of such clearing-houses of informa- 
tion as the Boston Vocation Bureau is described 
by Meyer Bloomfield in The Vocatiotial Guidance 
of Youthy yet even this Boston bureau feels that 
the surest way to bring the results of its investi- 
gation home to those who need them is through 
cooperation with the school organization. The 
central bureau becomes the repository of informa- 
tion ; the school authorities are the link which 
draws together the child and the advisory expert. 

The results of a successful system of vocational 
guidance will be manifold. Better adjustment of 
labor to demand, greater satisfaction, efficiency 
and advancement on the part of the worker, les- 
sened unemployment and labor wreckage, — all 
begin to attest the value of existing experiments 
to those directly touched by guidance work. But 
the most important results come, not from special 
advice given to individuals, but from bringing the 
public to consider the relative desirability of di- 
verse occupations. Unprejudiced guidance must 
mean a partial boycott of undesirable trades, for 
only inferior workers will seek employment where 
conditions are dangerous or unsanitary, hours 
long, wages low, and work tedious. Dissemination 

i88 



CHOOSING A VOCATION 

of these facts, now but vaguely apprehended, will 
enforce, more surely than ill-supported legislation, 
the installation of safety and sanitary devices and 
the general improvement of labor conditions. The 
manufacturer is made or unmade by patronage, 
and progressive employers, now forced by com- 
petition into countenancing labor conditions which 
they deplore, would welcome enlightened public 
opinion on these questions, since it would be the 
final weapon in driving from the field unprincipled 
competitors. Vocational guidance wisely con- 
ducted would prove both an effective means of 
social conservation, and a potent force in recon- 
structing industrial standards. 



XIII 

CONCLUSION 

The term "vocational training" is as broad as life 
itself, and at the conclusion of this brief volume, 
we have barely broached the question. Trades 
are multitudinous ; those trades only could be 
our theme which press upon us most urgently as 
an educational problem. But the principles 
evolved for industrial, agricultural, and domestic 
courses are equally applicable to commercial, 
mercantile, technical, and professional training. 
Even within the trades chosen for discussion, 
there has been a further limitation in treatment. 
We have dealt principally with the ordinary man ; 
technical schools, whether of high school or col- 
lege grade, aim definitely to prepare for manager- 
ial positions. Yet these higher schools are one in 
spirit with institutions giving elementary trade 
instruction ; all fit for productive, self-supporting 
life; all look toward the practical social use 
rather than the individual acquisition of culture 
and knowledge. The articulation of the elemen- 
tary vocational school with a complete system of 

190 



CONCLUSION 



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THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

vocational education, and the place in this plan 
for purely academic training is shown by the ac- 
companying tentative outline. Such a schedule is 
but the world in abstract, a plat of that arterial 
system through which inspiration and intelli- 
gence circulate to every social organ. 

The function of this present book, however, is 
suggestive rather than exhaustive, and its object 
will have been fully accomplished if, amid the 
windings of its theme, one dominant idea rises 
continually to view : the idea of social welfare. 
This is the touchstone by which the trade school 
will be tested. Not because agriculture, industry, 
and homemaking need competent workers ; not 
because vocational training will quicken the art- 
istic sensibilities of our people ; not because pre- 
sent schools do not interest our children ; not 
because man has a right to self-support ; not be- 
cause criminals will find in the trade school their 
salvation ; not because women receive from it 
marital and industrial freedom ; not because the 
unionist sees therein an advantage for his order 
and the socialist believes it a step nearer the 
millennium : — but because, from the deeply 
underlying harmony of these several interests, 
we infer one mighty common interest for all 
mankind. The vocational school preserves nor- 

192 



CONCLUSION 

mality and efficiency ; it strikes to the bottom, 
and has, in the broad program for social better- 
ment, a central place. Education and legislation : 
education the creator, legislation the conserver ; 
education the fluidizing, legislation the crystal- 
lizing element — these are the only sure instru- 
ments of progress. And the real motive power 
and vital spark lie in education. 

Democratic and practical schools forplain men, 
more than other educational propaganda, contain 
this potent force for uplift. More than anti-tuber- 
culosis societies, more than scientific charity and 
correction, more than juvenile improvement clubs, 
Boys' Scout movements, or any brave enterprise 
pushing forward alone to the frontiers of regen- 
eration ! For in vocational schools. Knowledge 
comes forward saying, as in the old play, — 

" Every man, I will go with thee to be thy guide, 
In thy most need to go by thy side." 

They will widen the scope of education to em- 
brace all classes of society, to include those very 
classes which charitable agencies strive ineffect- 
ually, because fragmentarily, to enlighten. 

The problem of vocational training is also more 
profound than preparing men and women to work. 
It is to educate the public mind, to embody a 

193 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

working ideal that will gradually transform in- 
dustrial practice, until labor, no longer cramping 
and brutalizing, is a beautiful realization of the 
noblest human possibilities ; until the old words 
of the Benedictine Rule take on their fullest 
meaning, and to work is verily to pray. 



XIV 

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON ELEMENTARY VOCA- 
TIONAL EDUCATION 

In selecting a bibliography on vocational train- 
ing, one is hampered by the great bulk of ma- 
terial dealing with the topic, and by the endless 
repetition of subject-matter which this literature 
displays. Discussion has so far been largely con- 
fined to criticism of current educational methods, 
arguments for the establishment of vocational 
schools, and general statistics concerning foreign 
systems of vocational education. The first two 
classes of articles are as a rule vaguely theoreti- 
cal, and the last class often fails to give a good 
working idea, either of a foreign system as a 
whole, or of just what is done in any particular 
trade school. Even the detailed descriptions, 
published in English, of foreign vocational 
schools are usually unsatisfactory because they 
give ideals and abstracts of curricula rather 
than actual classroom methods and their re- 
sults as a training for subsequent employment. 
Reliable and complete studies of trade school 

195 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

results as seen in the subsequent experiences of 
graduates is lacking for both American and for- 
eign institutions. 

The object in compiling this bibliography has 
been to make it at once [as brief and as represent- 
ative as possible, and the following books, articles 
and reports are chosen, not because they alone 
are worthy of perusal, but because each presents 
the subject from a different and important point 
of view. 

For a fuller account of general material on 
American phases of the question, see the Se- 
lected Bibliography published by the National 
Society for the Promotion of Industrial Educa- 
tion. 

I 

France 

Laws Governing Vocational Training. 

Cent Arts de Lutte SociaU : La Legislation de V Eftfance, Parts 
II and III. Jacques Bonzon. (Gillaumin et Cie, Paris, 1899.) 
Historical and Social Review of Need for Trade Education. 
VApprentissage : Hier — A ujourd'h ui — Demain. Pierre 

Brizon. (" Pages Libres," Paris, 1909.) 
La Crise de L" Appreiitissage et La Reforme de V Enseigne- 
ment Professionnel and VAge d^ Admission des En/ants au 
Travail et Travail de Demi- Temps. Martin Saint-Leon, 
(Chronique Sociale de France, Lyon, 1908.) 
De La Prostitution des En/ants, Part III, chapter ii, Eugene 
Prevost. (Plon, Nourrit et Cie, Paris, 1909.) 
196 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

V Enseignement Menager. Comptesse Diesbach. (Tegui, 

Paris, 1904.) 
Description of French System of Trade Education. 

U Enseignement Technique. Astier et Cuminal. (Roustan, 

Paris, 1909.) 
U Enseignement Professionnel en France. Rene Leblanc 

(Comely, Paris, 1905.) 
Les Ecoles et Les CEuvres Municipals d^ Enseignement h. Paris. 

M. Lavergne, (Mouillot, Paris, 1900.) 

II 

Germany 

Practical Efficiency of Trade Schools. 

The Cause and Extent of the Recent Indttstrial Progress of 

Germany^ p. 147. Earl Dean Howard (Houghton Mifflin 

Co., Boston, 1907.) 
Description of German System of Trade Education. 

Handbuch des deutschen Fortbildungsschulwesens . Vols. I-VI. 

Oscar Pache. (Wittenberg, 1896-1902.) 
V Enseignement Technique. Astier et Cuminal. (Roustan, 

Paris, 1909.) 
Industrial Education in Germany. (Report of U. S. Dept. 

of Commerce and Labor. Vol. xxxiii, p. 147.) 
Industrial Schools in Germany. (Report of Mass. Com- 
mission on Industrial Education, p. 258, 1906.) 
Trade Schools in Certain Localities. 

The Prussian System of Vocational Schools. (Report of U. S. 

Bureau of Education, 1910, chap, vii.) 
The Technical Continuation Schools of Munich. Paul Hanus. 

{School Review, vol, 13, p. 678.) 
Ubersicht iiber das Fortbildungsschulwesen und die gewerbli- 

chen Unterrichtsanstalten der Stadt Berlin. (Report of the 

Berliner Schulrat for 1909-10.) 
197 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
III 

Switzerland 

Reviews of Swiss S)'stem of Trade Education. 

V Enseignement Technique. Astier et Cuminal. (Roustan, 
Paris, 1909.) 

Industrial Schools of Switzerland. (Report of Mass. Com- 
mission on Industrial Education, p. 215, 1906.) 

IV 

England 

Need for Trade Education. 

Majority and Minority Reports, Royal Commission on the 
Poor-Laws and.the Relief of Distress. (Wyman & Son, Lon- 
don, 1909.) 

The Present Industrial Importance of Technical Education. 
Sir Phillip Magnus. {Engineering Magazine, vol. 24, p. 169.) 

Fabianism and the Empire. George Bernard Shaw. (Rich- 
ards, London, 1900.) 

The Nation, the Apprentice, and the Polytechnic. S. G. Raw- 
son. {Contemporary Review, vol. 80, p. 584.) 
Description of English Experiments in Trade Education. 

Continuation Schools in England and Elsewhere : Their Place 
in the Educational System of an Industrial and Commer- 
cial State. Michael Sadler. (Manchester University Press, 
1907.) 

Technical Education in Evening Schools. Clarence H. 
Creasey. (Sonnenschein, London, 1905.) 

Industrial Efficiency. Arthur Shadwell. (Longmans, Green & 
Co., New York, 1906.) 
Discussion of Type of School needed in Great Britain. 

Foundations of Trade and Industry. Fabian Ware. (Ap- 
pleton, New York, 1901.) 

198 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Report^ Consultative Committee on Attendance, Compulsory 
or Otherwise, at Continuation Schools. (Wyman & Son, 
London, 1909.) 



United States 

Apprenticeship in the United States. 

The Apprenticeship System and Its Relation to Industrial 

Education. Carroll D. Wright. (U. S. Bureau of Ed., 

1908, Bulletin 6.) 
The Apprenticeship System. Charles Pidgin. (Mass. Bureau 

of Statistics of Labor, 1906.) 
Education of Workers in the Shoe Industry. Arthur Dean. 

(Nat. Soc. for Pro. of Ind. Ed., Bulletin 8.) 
Education for Efficiency in Railroad Service. J. Shirley 

Eaton. (U. S. Bureau of Ed., 1909, Bulletin 10.) 
Industrial Education. Charles Thurber. {^School Review^ 

vol. 15, p. 375.) 
Industrial Education of Working Girls. Charles Pidgin 

(Mass. Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1905, Part i. 
How Girls Learn the Millinery Trade. Alice Barrows. ( The 

Survey^ April 18, 1910.) 
The Training of Millinery Workers. Alice Barrows. (Pro- 
ceedings of the Academy of Political Science, vol. i, no. i. 
Conditions of Entrance to the Principal Trades. (U. S. 

Bureau of Labor, 1906, Bulletin 67.) 
What is Ahead for the Untrai?ied Child in Industry. Suzan 

Myra Kingsbury. {Charities and the Commons, Oct. 5, 

1907.) 
Decay of Apprenticeship and Corporation Schools. Ralph 

Albertson. {Charities and the Commons, Oct. 5, 1907.) 
Apprenticeship and Corporation Schools. (Nat. Soc. for Pra 

of Ind. Ed., Bulletin 13.) 

199 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

Trade Schools in the United States. 

A Descriptive List of Trade and Industrial Schools in the 
United States. Charles R. Richards. (Nat. See. for Pro. 
of Ind. Ed., Bulletin ii.) 
Legislation upon Industrial Education in the United States. 
(Nat. Soc. for Pro. of Ind. Ed., Bulletin 12.) 
Results of Trade Schooling as a Preparation for Work. 

See Report of Russell Sage Foundation Committee on 
Women's Work. About to be published. 
Attitude of Trade Unions toward Industrial Education. 

Industrial Education. (Bulletin of American Federation of 
Labor, Washington, 1910.) 
Industrial and Agricultural Education for the Negro. 

Up from Slavery. Booker T. Washington. (Doubleday, 

Page & Co., New York, 1903.) 
The Education of the Negro. Booker T. Washington, 
(Lyon, Chicago, 1904) 
Elementary Agricultural Education in the United States. 

Agricultural Education, includittg Nature Study and School 
Gardens. James Ralph Jewell. (U. S. Bureau of Ed., 

1907, Bulletin 2.) 

On the Training of Persotis to Teach Agriculture in Public 
Schools. Liberty Hyde Bailey. (U. S. Bureau of Ed., 

1908, Bulletin i.) 

Agricultural Education. (Report of U. S. Bureau of Ed., 

1910, chap. IV.) 
The American System of Agricultural Education. A. C. True 

and Dick J. Crosby. (U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, Office of 

Experiment Stations, Circular 106.) 
Cyclopedia of American Agriculture. L. H. Bailey. (Mac- 

millan Co., New York.) 
See also bibliography in Professor Bailey's bulletin named 

above. 
The Type of Trade School needed in the United States. 

Education for the Trades ; From the Standpoint of the Manu- 

200 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

facturer, Milton P. Higgins. (Proceedings of Nat. Ed. 

Assoc, 1903, p. 597.) 
Industrial Education for Women. Mrs. Raymond Robbins. 

(Proceedings of Nat. Soc. for Pro. of Ind. Ed., Bulletin 
10.) 
The True Ideal of a Public School System that Aims to Bene- 
fit All. Discussion by Jane Addams. (Proceedings of Nat. 

Soc. for Pro. of Ind. Ed., Bulletin 6, Part 11.) 
Democracy and Social Ethics, chapter vi. Jane Addams. 

(Macmillan Co., New York, 1905.) 
What can the Grade School do for Industrial Education ? 

Anna Garlan Spencer. (Proceedings of Nat. Soc. for Pro. 

of Ind. Ed., Bulletin 10.) 
Evening Schools; Their Purpose and Limitations. John 

Shearer. (Proceedings of Nat. Soc. for Pro. of Ind. Ed., 

Bulletin 10.) 
The Intermediate Industrial School. Charles R. Allen and 

William H. Elson. (Proceedings of Nat. Soc. for Pro. of 

Ind. Ed., Bulletin 10.) 
Vocational Guidance. 

The Vocational Guidance of Youth. Meyer Bloomfield. 

(Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston, 191 1.) 
Choosing a Vocation. Frank Parsons. (Houghton Mifflin Co., 

Boston, 1909.) 
The Labor Exchange in Relation to Boy and Girl Labor. 

Frederick Keeling. (P. S. King & Son, London.) 
Report, Apprenticeship and Skilled Employment Association. 

(Denison House, London, 1909.) 
Pamphlets descriptive of opportunities for boys and girls in 
agriculture, commerce, industry and the professions have 
been published by — 
Boston Vocation Bureau ; 

Students' Aid Committee of Brooklyn High School, Teach- 
ers' Association ; 
Poughkeepsie Board of Education ; 

201 



THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 

English Apprenticeship and Skilled Employment Commit- 
tees ; 
Albert Otto Paul and C. Bange of Leipzig; 
The Woman's Municipal League and the Woman's Educa- 
tional and Industrial Union of Boston, etc. 
General Discussion of Vocational Training and Allied Topics. 

The Place of Industries in Elementary Education. Kather- 
ine Dopp. (University of Chicago Press, 1906.) 

The Movement for Industrial Education. (Collection of arti' 
cles in Charities and the Commons for Oct. 5, 1907.) 

Educational Aims and Educational Values and Beginnings 
in Industrial Education, Paul Hanus. (Houghton Mifflin 
Co., Boston, 1908.) 

The Worker and the State. Arthur Dean. (Century Co., 
New York, 1910.) 

The Problem of Vocational Education. David Snedden. 
(Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 191 1.) 

Education for Efficiency. E. Davenport. (Heath & Co., 
Boston, 1909.) 

Education for Efficiency. Charles W. Eliot. (Houghton 
Mifflin Co., Boston, 1909.) 

The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. Jane Addams. 
(Macmillan Co., New York, 1910.) 

Unemployment. W. H. Beveridge. (Longmans, Green & 
Co., New York, 1909.) 

Itidustrial Democracy. Sidney and Beatrice Webb. (Long- 
mans Green & Co., New York, 1897.) 

The Town Child. Reginald Bray. (T. Fisher Unwin, Lon- 
don, 1909.) 

Education for Citizenship. George Kerschensteiner. (Rand, 
McNally & Co., Chicago, 191 1.) 



OUTLINE 

I. FOREWORD 

1. Small number of children in high school ... i 

2. Meaning to nation i 

3. Combating ignorance the true constructive phil- 

anthropy 2 

4. Object of present discussion 4 

II. THE HAND OF IRON 

1. The true pedagogue essentially a man of the world 6 

2. This is an age of highly specialized industry . . 6 

3. Decay of apprenticeship 10 

4. Effect on production of the subservience of the 

man and his mind to the machine 13 

5. Scarcity of skilled workers 20 

6. Unemployment and vagrancy 21 

7. Overcrowding in non-industrial lines 22 

III. THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 

1. Origin of present system of popular education . 24 

2. Embodies at once a democratic view of men and 

an undemocratic view of society 26 

3. The high school course from the standpoint of 

the manual worker 27 

4. Small enrollment explained 27 

5. High schools direct graduates into professions 

and commerce 27 

203 



OUTLINE 

6. Strictly developmental function of so-called man- 

ual-training courses 30 

7. Reasons for dropping out during high school 

course 32 

8. Devitalized teaching 35 

9. " The course of study for its own sake "... 37 

IV. A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 

1. Industry needs a scientific spirit in every worker 38 

2. Salutary effect on academic education of alliance 

with trade training 39 

3. Reasons for expecting larger school enrollment 

when vocational schools are established . . 42 

4. Bearing of trade education on international com- 

petition 46 

5. Vocational training a ground plank in the so- 

cial betterment program 48 

6. Child labor and the trade school 51 

7. Social advantages of trade training and its influ- 

ence on unimaginative toil 52 

V. TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 

1. The economic dependence of woman .... 57 

2. An unorganized strike against the unprogressive 

and injurious labor conditions in the home- 
making trade 61 

3. Modifications of the family institution necessary 

to give women human freedom 61 

4. How to persuade women that housekeeping is 

interesting 62 

5. Training for child rearing 63 

204 



OUTLINE 

6. Business and industrial training for women . . 66 

7. Problem of late marriages 70 

8. Vocational training as a partial remedy for pros- 

titution 71 

VI. IN THE COUNTRY 

1. Urban character of our civilization 74 

2. Neglect of rural resources ; human, social, and 

economic 75 

3. Beginnings of agricultural education for upper 

classes ^^ 

4. Comparative neglect of plain farmer . . . , 77 

5. Soil as a natural resource 78 

6. Necessity of training for successful farming. . 78 

7. Form agricultural education should take in rural 

grammar and high schools 80 

8. What is already being done at home and abroad 84 

9. Human rather than economic aspect of problem 89 

VII. TRADE EDUCATION AND ORGANIZED 

LABOR 

1. Views of American Federation of Labor on in- 

dustrial education 91 

2. Attitude of trade unions toward apprenticeship. 92 

3. Labor problems which arise in grounding trade 

schools 94 

4. Effect on unionism of public trade education ; 

the sale of school-made goods, rise in wages, 
security from immigrant competition, greater 
effectiveness in trade-union action .... 97 

205 



OUTLINE 



VIII. TRADE EDUCATION AND SOCIALISM 

1. What socialism is and is not 102 

2. Point at which trade education touches socialism 104 

3. Increasingly socialistic form of society . . . 104 

4. Greater intelligence and civic spirit which this 

demands from voters 105 

5. Intelligence needed not only to realize the social- 

istic ideal without injustice, but to conduct 

efficiently a socialistic state 106 

IX. FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 

1. Advantages of study of foreign vocational 

schools 109 

2. Three types of trade schools no 

3. Origin of trade schools in France in 

4. Characteristics of French course of study . . 113 

5. Detailed description of two Parisian trade 

schools 114 

6. Advantages and disadvantages of this system as 

seen in actual results 123 

7. Two solutions offered 126 

8. German ideal in industrial education .... 126 

9. Berlin law governing trade education .... 129 

10. A typical continuation school for apprentices . 130 

11. Two higher trade schools for experienced work- 

ers 133 

12. The practice shops 136 

13. Vocational training for girls 136 

14. Contrast between the Munich and the Berlin 

ideals for industrial education 137 

206 



OUTLINE 

15. Superiority of Munich plan 138 

16. The Pranck continuation school 139 

17. Higher schools for locksmiths 141 

18. Estimate of Munich system 142 

19. The Swiss system as a model of harmonious co- 

operation between labor, capital, legislative 
bodies, and educational authorities .... 143 

X. AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 

X. General outline of trade schools in the United 

States 149 

2. Description and criticism of work in preparatory 

trade schools 150 

3. In trade schools designed to supplant appren- 

ticeship 154 

4. In technical high schools 157 

5. In evening schools and part time schools (public 

and private) 158 

6. General summary of value of these experiments 164 

XI. THE TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 
IN THE UNITED STATES 

1. An ideal for American^education 167 

2. Mistakes made in grounding trade schools . . 168 

3. Investigation which should precede grounding 

such schools 169 

4. Tentative statement of type needed .... 171 

5. When trade instruction should begin .... 172 

6. Balance between academic and trade instruction 173 

7. Teachers for trade schools 1 76 

8. True function of preparatory trade schools . . 178 

9. Shall vocational training be obligatory? , . . iSo 

207 



OUTLINE 



XII. CHOOSING A VOCATION 

1. Human and industrial loss from present chaotic 

methods of choosing a vocation i8i 

2. Reasons for unwise choice 182 

3. Inadequacy of mere vocational education . . . 182 

4. The need for vocational guidance 182 

5. Function of the vocational expert 186 

6. Wider outcome of vocational guidance . . . 188 

XIII. CONCLUSION 

1. Limitations inevitable in treating subject . . . 190 

2. Tentative plan for a complete system of voca- 

tional training 191 

3. Social welfare the real argument for the trade 

school 192 

4. The trade school's contribution to social progress 

through the individual 193 

5. Reaction on industrial methods 194 

XIV. BIBLIOGRAPHY ON ELEMENTARY VOCA- 
TIONAL EDUCATION 

1. Scope of the bibliography 195 

2. France 196 

3. Germany 197 

4. Switzerland 198 

5. England 198 

6. United States 199 



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